Tauvid™: The First FDA-Approved PET Tracer for Imaging Tau Pathology in Alzheimer's Disease

Caitlin V M L Jie; Valerie Treyer; Roger Schibli; Linjing Mu

doi:10.3390/ph14020110

Tauvid™: The First FDA-Approved PET Tracer for Imaging Tau Pathology in Alzheimer's Disease

Pharmaceuticals (Basel). 2021 Jan 30;14(2):110. doi: 10.3390/ph14020110.

Authors

Caitlin V M L Jie¹, Valerie Treyer², Roger Schibli¹, Linjing Mu^{1 2}

Affiliations

¹ Center for Radiopharmaceutical Sciences, Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zürich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
² Department of Nuclear Medicine, University Hospital Zurich, 8091 Zurich, Switzerland.

Abstract

Tauvid has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2020 for positron emission tomography (PET) imaging of adult patients with cognitive impairments undergoing evaluation for Alzheimer's disease (AD) based on tau pathology. Abnormal aggregation of tau proteins is one of the main pathologies present in AD and is receiving increasing attention as a diagnostic and therapeutic target. In this review, we summarised the production and quality control of Tauvid, its clinical application, pharmacology and pharmacokinetics, as well as its limitation due to off-target binding. Moreover, a brief overview on the second-generation of Tau PET tracers is provided. The approval of Tauvid marks a step forward in the field of AD research and opens up opportunities for second-generation tau tracers to advance tau PET imaging in the clinic.

Keywords: PET; [18F]flortaucipir; alzheimer’s disease; tau neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs); tauvid™.

Publication types

Review