PraanaTech's first interview: our vision for Alzheimer's diagnostics

Here it comes — our first interview! There is something both thrilling and humbling about sharing your work publicly for the first time. When PraanaTech gave its first interview, I felt all of those emotions simultaneously. We had spent months deep in the technical work: designing PET detector architectures, refining our understanding of scintillation crystals and silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs), modeling system performance, and thinking carefully about what it would take to bring a genuinely accessible medical imaging system to market. And then, suddenly, we were telling the world about it.

The core message I wanted to convey in that first interview was simple: the problem we are solving is not a technology problem in the conventional sense. The technology to perform amyloid PET imaging — to identify the pathological protein deposits that define Alzheimer's disease before symptoms appear — already exists. The problem is access. Current PET systems are engineered for high-throughput academic and hospital environments. They are expensive to purchase, expensive to operate, and require specialized infrastructure and personnel. The result is a profound inequality: patients in major urban centers with access to top-tier academic medical institutions can potentially benefit from the most advanced diagnostic tools available, while patients in smaller cities, rural areas, or lower-resource healthcare systems effectively cannot. At PraanaTech, we believe that is unacceptable.

What makes our approach different is that we are rethinking the PET system architecture from the ground up — not to produce a stripped-down version of existing technology, but to build something that delivers high diagnostic quality in a smaller, more efficient, more deployable form factor. Our detector technology is at the heart of this. By pushing the boundaries of time-of-flight (TOF) resolution and detector efficiency, we can achieve the image quality needed for clinical confidence while operating with a fundamentally different system profile. That first interview was just the beginning of the conversation — and I look forward to continuing it here, post by post, as our journey unfolds.