Molecular Imaging in Focus: Emerging Tau PET Radiotracer Shows Early Promise for CTE Detection in Living Patients

A small but notable preliminary study presented at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) annual meeting is drawing attention for its early-stage findings on a novel tau PET radiotracer, ¹⁸F-OXD-2314, and its potential applicability in detecting chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in living patients.

For the study, researchers evaluated the utility of tau PET radiotracer ¹⁸F-OXD-2314 in dynamic brain PET imaging for three retired collision sport athletes (mean age of 61) suspected for CTE and seven healthy control participants (mean age of 63).¹

In a recent interview with Diagnostic Imaging, lead study author Isabelle Boileau, PhD discussed the intriguing findings they saw with ¹⁸F-OXD-2314 in the retired collision sport athletes.

“The signal wasn't exactly what we'd expect, but we did find, interestingly, this very high signal at the junction between the white and the gray matter, which is, I think, typical of CTE. We also found quite a bit of binding in the white matter,” explained Dr. Boileau, a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto.

“Now are we looking at other aspects of CTE that we can't look at in the postmortem human brain, or is this something else? We still need to figure that part out, and that's, I guess, the exciting bit of being in research.”

While acknowledging the preliminary nature of the research and the need for more studies, Dr. Boileau noted the potential use of ¹⁸F-OXD-2314 for people wrestling with the symptoms of this degenerative disease.

“This would be a game changer, not only because it would help validate, you know, the suffering and the difficulties (these) people have in life, but it also — because there's a lot of advancement in the development of the tau targeting therapeutics — might put us in a position where we are selecting people based on this imaging agent for participating in trials of these advancing therapeutics, and eventually being able to treat people that have bioimaging indication of tau deposition in the brain,” posited Dr. Boileau, a professor of psychiatry, pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Toronto.

(Editor’s note: For additional content from the SNMMI conference, click here.)

Reference

1. Boileau I, Narciso L, Murrell E, et al. First-in-human tau PET using (¹⁸F)OXD-2314 in people with suspected chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Available at: https://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/67/supplement_1/262070 . Presented at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) conference, May 30-June 2, 2026, Los Angeles.

(Editor’s note: For related content, see “MRI Study Suggests Repetitive Soccer Heading May Lead to Brain Abnormalities in “Locations Most Characteristic of CTE’,” “MRI Study Reveals Significant Brain Changes in Adolescent Football Players” and “Could Structural MRI Findings Help Detect CTE During Life?”)