He receives the grant for the project ‘Preclinical Evaluation of Potential Cholinergic PET Imaging Tracers’ and it is valid for a three-year period.
Photo: Private.
“I was surprised and very happy when I found out that I had been awarded this amount,” says Taher Darreh-Shori, senior researcher and docent at the Division of Clinical Geriatrics, NVS. “At the same time, I was also very proud and touched because our research application was selected among approximately 1,000 applications.”
“I immediately shared the good news with my co-applicant researchers Amit Kumar, Rajnish Kumar, and Sangram Nag,” he continues.
The majority of the funds will be used to recruit two postdoctoral researchers, and at a later stage, some will be used for the planned PET camera studies on animal models.
The main goal of this project is to develop and test new imaging tools to help diagnose and predict serious diseases in people with conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy body dementia, ALS, and other related diseases. To achieve this, they focus on a specific protein called ChAT (pronounced ‘kat’). This protein is important because it is involved in memory and a range of other cognitive functions in the brain. It produces a neurotransmitter that also helps control muscle movements throughout the body. ChAT is one of the first proteins affected in major dementia and diseases like ALS.
The researchers have created special compounds to track ChAT with PET cameras. Right now, there is no ChAT-specific PET camera tracer available for this purpose in clinical settings. PET scans are commonly used in hospitals to check how well certain neuronal functions in the brain or body are working.
“We believe that this research will lead to these PET imaging tools being used on patients with the aforenoted serious conditions in the near future,” concludes Taher Darreh-Shori.
