Yes, so this is basically a new visual interpretation method for tau PET, for the only tracer that’s being approved so far, flortaucipir. And I think it’s particularly useful, right, because when we talk with clinicians and medical physicians that are using tau PET in their clinical practice, right, they typically ask whether we can further stage the tau PET rather than simply classifying it as positive or negative...
Yes, so this is basically a new visual interpretation method for tau PET, for the only tracer that’s being approved so far, flortaucipir. And I think it’s particularly useful, right, because when we talk with clinicians and medical physicians that are using tau PET in their clinical practice, right, they typically ask whether we can further stage the tau PET rather than simply classifying it as positive or negative. So this visual interpretation method basically addresses this point here, right? As you probably know, it’s usually difficult to quantify PET scans in clinical practice. So nuclear medicine physicians typically rely on visual methods. So that’s why this approach is important for clinical practice. So what we wanted to do here is basically to independently validate this method that was developed by the people at Eli Lilly before in a clinical trial. They basically demonstrated that it is possible to stage tau pathology with this method. We wanted to evaluate this method in an independent sample and see if it’s actually doing what it’s supposed to be doing, which is to stage tau pathology. So we basically, yeah, evaluated, yeah, let’s say inter-reader consistency. We evaluated the frequency of, you know, this positive high tau burden in different scenarios, in particular with age, right? Because we know that in early onset AD, we see high tau burden, right? So, yeah, apparently this method works well also in early onset AD because the vast majority of these early onset AD cases are also high tau burden according to visual interpretation. That’s good. And, yeah, basically we see also more neurodegeneration when you see the tau pattern, it’s clear that the tau pattern we see is associated with faster clinical progression. So in summary, the method seems to work well and it’s useful to stage the tau pathology and overall disease progression in Alzheimer’s disease and it can be applied in a clinical context based on the FDA-approved visual reads that were applied before, because this is just an extension of the previous FDA-approved methods. So, yeah, in conclusion, I think this method is actually very useful to stage tau pathology and Alzheimer’s disease and overall disease progression. There’s also other potential applications as well, such as predicting treatment response to anti-amyloid therapies. For instance, we know that if you have a very high burden of tau pathology, you are less likely to meaningfully respond to anti-amyloid therapies. So, you know, that’s one of the potential applications among.
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