Antibody-Based In Vivo PET Imaging Detects Amyloid-beta Reduction in Alzheimer Transgenic Mice After BACE-1 Inhibition

Visualization of amyloid-beta (A beta) pathology with PET has become an important tool for making a specific clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer disease (AD). However, the available amyloid PET radioligands, such as C-11-Pittsburgh compound B, reflect levels of insoluble A beta plaques but do not capture soluble and protofibrillar A beta forms. Furthermore, the plaque load appears to be fairly static during clinical stages of AD and may not be affected by A beta-reducing treatments. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether a novel PET radioligand based on an antibody directed toward soluble aggregates of A beta can be used to detect changes in A beta levels during disease progression and after treatment with a beta-secretase (BACE-1) inhibitor. Methods: One set of transgenic mice (tg-ArcSwe, a model of A beta pathology) aged between 7 and 16 mo underwent PET with the A beta protofibril-selective radioligand I-124-RmAb158-scFv8D3 (where RmAb is recombinant mouse monoclonal antibody and scFv is single-chain variable fragment) to follow progression of A beta pathology in the brain. A second set of tg-ArcSwe mice, aged 10 mo, were treated with the BACE-1 inhibitor NB-360 for 3 mo and compared with an untreated control group. A third set of tg-ArcSwe mice, also aged 10 mo, underwent PET as a baseline group. Brain tissue was isolated after PET to determine levels of A beta by ELISA and immunohistochemistry. Results: The concentration of I-124-RmAb158-scFv8D3, as measured in vivo with PET, increased with age and corresponded well with the ex vivo autoradiography and A beta immunohistochemistry results. Mice treated with NB-360 showed significantly lower in vivo PET signals than untreated animals and were similar to the baseline animals. The decreased I-124-RmAb158-scFv8D3 concentrations in NB-360-treated mice, as quantified with PET, corresponded well with the decreased A beta levels measured in postmortem brain. Conclusion: Several treatments for AD are in phase 2 and 3 clinical trials, but the possibility of studying treatment effects in vivo on the important, nonfibrillar, forms of A beta is limited. This study demonstrated the ability of the A beta protofibril-selective radioligand I-124-RmAb158-scFv8D3 to follow disease progression and detect treatment effects with PET imaging in tg-ArcSwe mice.