Yeah, so this was the study published a few months ago. Yeah, I think, to my knowledge, there’s no other AD-specific biomarker that is so strongly associated with the risk of clinically relevant outcomes. This is not about a change that is difficult to interpret, right? So we evaluated progressions to a clinical diagnosis of MCI or dementia. Which can be considered a clinically relevant event or changes in the CDR global...
Yeah, so this was the study published a few months ago. Yeah, I think, to my knowledge, there’s no other AD-specific biomarker that is so strongly associated with the risk of clinically relevant outcomes. This is not about a change that is difficult to interpret, right? So we evaluated progressions to a clinical diagnosis of MCI or dementia. Which can be considered a clinically relevant event or changes in the CDR global. So in general, these metrics are always considered relevant. So this is what we wanted to assess. And to my knowledge, there’s no other biomarker in the AD field that with a truly pre-specified method for defining positivity, that is through a visual read using an FDA-approved visual interpretation method for an FDA-approved radiotracer, in this case, flortaucipir, right? We applied this prospectively to a retrospective cohort, right? But we applied this, you know, we didn’t cherry-pick the cut point. So we really used what is in the FDA guidelines for establishing positivity. There’s no other biomarker that is so strongly associated with the risk of clinically relevant outcomes across the entire spectrum of the disease, not only in symptomatic patients, but also in cognitively normal individuals. So that’s another important finding we report in this study. That it is possible to identify a significant number of cognitively normal individuals who are positive on a tau PET scan, right? In a visual manner. So before, yeah, we thought that a positive tau PET scan, according to visual reads in the neocortex, was not compatible with normal cognition. Now in this work, we demonstrate that there is a significant fraction of individuals in the preclinical AD phase that have a positive tau PET scan. And those are precisely the ones that are at the highest risk of progressing to symptomatic stages of the disease. So I think it’s very relevant, right? Because we also see that those who have a negative tau PET scan, but still are amyloid positive, their trajectories are very similar to those who are amyloid negative and tau PET negative, right? So, yeah, I think it really highlights that tau PET can identify the subset of all the cognitively normal individuals who are amyloid positive, right? That are also at high risk of developing symptoms. Which was the limitation of amyloid PET. We could see a significant number of cognitively normal individuals with a positive amyloid PET scan. And when we follow them up, right, we saw that the majority actually didn’t develop any symptoms at all. And the majority will, yeah, will pass without experiencing symptoms. Now, with tau PET, we don’t have this problem anymore. So we have, you know, we identify those who have amyloid and who are truly at the risk of developing symptoms. So I think that’s the main key point of this study.
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