Excerpt

Cardiac immunoglobulin light chain (AL) amyloidosis, an archetype of restrictive heart failure, has a median survival <1 year from onset of heart failure, if untreated.1 While some therapies have proven highly effective for systemic AL amyloidosis, they have, unfortunately, also led to unacceptably high early treatment-related mortality in individuals with cardiac involvement.1 ^, 2 The gravity of this illness has motivated a surge in clinical trials of novel anti-amyloid therapies for AL and for transthyretin amyloidosis (ATTR, a more benign form of cardiac amyloidosis), the two most common forms of cardiac amyloidoses, in the hope of improving outcomes. Despite these positive steps, development of therapeutic breakthroughs for this disease is currently stalled because imaging advancements have lagged drug development. In fact, the lack of reproducible, validated, and quantitative in vivo imaging tools has become a major obstacle to the development of novel anti-amyloid therapies for the heart. This paper by Kero et al3 on C11-PIB imaging of cardiac amyloidosis is an important first step in the journey toward solving this problem. …