AD/PD 2024: a new era for Alzheimer's disease and the challenge of accessible imaging

I had the privilege of representing PraanaTech at the AD/PD 2024 conference — one of the world's leading scientific meetings on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease research. Walking into that opening session and hearing the leading voices in the field declare, with genuine confidence, that we are entering a new era for Alzheimer's disease thanks to new treatment drugs — that was a moment I will not forget. After decades of failed clinical trials and therapeutic frustration, the field is finally turning a corner. Disease-modifying therapies (DMTs) are moving from clinical trials into real-world clinical practice, and the implications for patients, families, and healthcare systems are profound.

But as I sat listening to the keynotes and participating in the scientific sessions, one question kept returning to me: how are we going to handle the volume? The new DMTs require confirmed amyloid PET positivity before treatment can begin. That is not a bureaucratic hurdle — it is sound scientific practice, ensuring that patients who receive these powerful and expensive therapies actually have the pathology those therapies target. But it means that every patient considered for a DMT needs to undergo a PET scan. And the population of patients who could benefit from early intervention is enormous: tens of millions of people worldwide are in the pre-symptomatic or early symptomatic stages of Alzheimer's disease. The current global PET infrastructure — concentrated in academic medical centers in wealthy urban areas — is nowhere near capable of handling that diagnostic demand.

This is the challenge that defines our work at PraanaTech. It is not enough to celebrate the arrival of effective therapies if we cannot diagnose the patients who need them in time and at scale. Accessible imaging is not a secondary concern — it is the critical infrastructure on which the entire promise of the new therapeutic era depends. The AD/PD 2024 conference confirmed for me, with greater clarity than ever, that the work we are doing is not just commercially interesting — it is medically essential. We have the ability to make PET imaging accessible, and we have the responsibility to do it as fast as we can.