Probing the Brain for Answers: A PET Tracer for Early Alzheimer’s Diagnosis
As seen in BioTechniques

Alzheimer’s disease is notoriously difficult to diagnose early. By the time current brain imaging tools can detect it, the window for effective treatment has often already closed. So what if we could spot the signs a decade earlier?

That’s exactly what Yanyan Zhao, a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, is working on. At ELRIG Drug Discovery 2025 in Liverpool, she spoke to BioTechniques about her work developing a new PET imaging tracer that targets the earliest toxic forms of Alzheimer’s-related proteins. Long before the large aggregates that current tracers rely on have even formed. 

In this interview, Yanyan walks through how her team approached it, the challenges of working at such a small scale, and why access to the Cambridge Brain Bank has been so important to the research.

She also talks about what comes next and why the connections she made at Drug Discovery 2025 could help accelerate a discovery that might one day change how we diagnose one of the world’s most common and devastating diseases.