The Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) announced today that it is providing a grant of $200,000 to Abiant, Inc. (Deerfield, IL), for the development of a highly accurate imaging diagnostic for Alzheimer's Disease. Abiant, a privately held company, is dedicated to the application of neuroimaging to improve the diagnosis and treatment of neurologic and neuropsychiatric disorders.
Abiant's diagnostic approach combines key advances in the analysis of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) images of the brain. The first of these was developed by Lisa Mosconi, PhD, Henry Rusinek, PhD, and Wai Tsui, PhD at the NYU School of Medicine's Center for Brain Health, directed by Mony de Leon, PhD. This advance allows the precise, automated measurement of glucose metabolism in the hippocampus, a brain structure that is critical to new memory formation and which is affected very early in Alzheimer's disease. Abiant is combining this with other key advances in statistical analysis tools that consolidate information from many regions in the brain into measurable patterns of disease progression. In studies using patients from academic centers worldwide, these approaches have been able to predict future decline, and to distinguish between types of dementia with very high accuracy.