AC Immune SA, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company pioneering precision therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases, today announced the publication in Nature Communications of preclinical data on its first-in-class brain positron emission tomography (PET) tracers for imaging TDP-43 pathology. The selected candidate, ACI-19626, potentially enables a precision medicine approach to multiple neurodegenerative diseases that are currently difficult to diagnose and differentiate from each other.
– Aggregated TDP-43 is a pathological hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases including ALS, FTD and LATE, and a co-pathology in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases
– PET imaging of aggregated TDP-43 could facilitate precision medicine in these diseases, whose shared clinical features complicate differential diagnosis, potentially delaying therapy
– Based on specificity, sensitivity, and pharmacokinetic properties, ACI-19626 was advanced into a Phase 1 clinical study with initial readout expected in Q4 2025