MICL researchers Stephen Thompson and Selena M Sephton have been awarded the MS Catalyst Award for investigating novel PET radiotracers for imaging NAAA in MS.

We hope to use PET to enable us to obtain a quantitative measure of neuroinflammation in the MS brain. We aim to achieve this by developing a novel radiotracer for imaging NAAA enzyme which has been shown to be implicated in the neuroinflammatory processes, particularly in MS. 

The award includes a one year studentship for Simon Zientek, a third year PhD student working at MICL with us.  He will begin working on the synthesis and radiosynthesis of potential radiotracer candidates and conduct their pharmacological evaluation.