Ruiqing Ni

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia with progressive cognitive impairment, affecting 50 million people worldwide. The use of  amyloid-beta biomarkers enables diagnosis 10-15 years before onset of clinical symptoms. Existing diagnostic biomarker positron emission tomography is expensive, radioactive and of limited testing capacity, while cerebrospinal fluid assay has low acceptance among patients. There is thus an unmet clinical need for an affordable and non-invasive brain imaging tool that enables screening for Alzheimer’s disease in elderly population. For the upcoming expensive Alzheimer’s disease treatments, the paying insurance companies will likely require biomarker evidence of brain amyloid-beta accumulation.

Ruiqing Ni together with her team from NeuroPAT aims to develop a cost-efficient, non-invasive, non-radioactive photoacoustic tomography tool using amyloid-beta probe for precision detection of Alzheimer disease for screening in elderly population.
Within the Fellowship Project Ruiqing Ni will develope suitable imaging probes and establish the feasibility and safety data for the new imaging method. The goal is to prepare a clinical trial for year 2023.

Affiliation: Prof. Roger M Nitsch
Start date: 02/2021