From molecules to system failure: translational frontiers of multimodal imaging in neurodegenerative diseases

Excerpt

Understanding the molecular and neural underpinnings of neurodegenerative diseases is one of the greatest challenges in today’s health-related research. To this end, the translation of evidence from basic science (e.g., at the molecular, cellular, or animal model level) to clinical science is paramount, yet remains particularly hard to achieve. Simultaneously, the plethora of evidence for the clinical utility of molecular imaging has not yet lead to a sufficiently available and standardized use in clinical practice and there is a critical need of a science-to-guidelines transition of these techniques. Both tasks demand an iterative, multi-disciplinary, highly collaborative approach. Following this formula, we started a biannual symposium—called “Multimodal Imaging in Neurodegeneration Cologne,” or short MINC—specifically dedicated to bridge translational gaps in particularly topical areas of research in neurodegenerative diseases. The MINC symposium in October 2018 was focused on five topics: the cause and effect of cerebral protein aggregation pathologies (beta-amyloid, tau, and alpha-synuclein), the various facets of neuroinflammation in neurodegenerative diseases, non-dopaminergic transmitter dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease, and the development of proteinaceous agents for molecular PET imaging and for therapy. The great success of this meeting was largely due to the gathering and interaction of scientist from various disciplines who would not usually meet at their respective science meetings. The 2 days of talks and discussions by experts in various fields from basic to clinical science and imaging yielded many intriguing insights. We have asked teams of participants of the meeting to summarize the main insights from this meeting. This resulted in three key chapters, which are outlined below and discussed in greater depth in three papers, which are published in this issue. We are extremely grateful to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for funding the MINC symposium (EI 892/5–1) and to the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging for publishing these major outcomes of the MINC symposium as three separate publications in this issue. …