Following a £0.5m Medical Research Council (MRC) grant to implement new Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging tracers for mitochondrial dysfunction and synaptic loss, Imanova has been awarded an additional £1m of strategic funding.

The funding, from the MRC, is for clinical evaluation of this combination of tracers in Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease - Stage 1 of the MIND-MAPS (Molecular Imaging of Neurodegenerative Disease – Mitochondria, Associated Proteins & Synapses) programme.

Kevin Cox, Imanova’s CEO, commented: “We are delighted to have been awarded strategic funding for the MIND-MAPS programme. We would like to thank the MRC and Dementias Platform UK (DPUK) for supporting the proposal and look forward to engaging more widely with the DPUK Imaging Network.”

MIND-MAPS is a pre-competitive consortium between Imanova, AbbVie, the MRC, the Hamamatsu Photonics PET centre, drawing on the therapy area expertise of the DPUK members.

The aim of the programme is the evaluation of multiple markers of neuropathological changes, in healthy subjects and patients with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, to investigate common pathways of neurodegeneration. Well characterised molecular markers of neurodegenerative disease progression promise to accelerate the development of disease modifying treatment by providing objective and sensitive early markers to evaluate novel treatments.

Ilan Rabiner, Chief Medical Officer at Imanova, stated: “This will be the first study evaluating a set of molecular markers within an individual and will provide the tools for early assessment of novel disease modifying treatments, which currently require long and expensive Phase II studies for proof of concept.”

The study team will work closely with the DPUK Imaging Network, a newly established network that links neuroimaging for neurodegenerative disease across eight major UK research institutions (Cambridge, UCL, KCL, Imperial College London, Cardiff, Manchester, Newcastle, and Edinburgh).

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