Ben Woolley

Contact

benjamin.woolley16@imperial.ac.uk

Research

"Dual-Modal Probes for Imaging the Brain and Alzheimer’s Disease"

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, affecting over 5 million people worldwide. It causes progressive and irreversible cognitive decline and eventually results in death. Alzheimer’s disease is characterised by three key biomarkers: amyloid-beta plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, and neuroinflammation. Amyloid-beta plaques have been extensively imaged for the past two decades, but recent evidence suggests that it is actually the soluble amyloid-beta oligomers that are the neurotoxic species. The development of a molecular imaging probe that targets these oligomers specifically would allow an earlier diagnosis as well as potential new therapeutics and drugs to fight the disease.
The brain has been imaged over the past two decades using a variety of molecular imaging modalities, including PET, MRI, and optical imaging. PET has been the workhorse for this imaging due to its superior sensitivity and ability to often penetrate the blood-brain-barrier with small-molecule radiotracers. However, the focus is now moving onto MRI probes - which have superior spatial resolution, and optical probes - which are often cheaper and require low-cost detectors and machinery. Only a select few optical imaging probes have been developed for targeting the soluble amyloid-beta oligomers, and these probes could still be improved in terms of their binding ability and emission wavelengths. My work will aim to develop novel dual-modal optical/MRI probes for imaging soluble amyloid-beta oligomers, and more generally multi-modality probes for brain imaging and neuroinflammation. 

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