Pittsburgh compound B

To answer these needs, a research team from the University of Pittsburgh led by geriatrics psychiatrist William E. Klunk and radiochemist Chester A. Mathis synthesised charge-neutral benzothiazoles derived from thioflavin T, which included a small number of compounds with suitable properties for use as a positron emission tomography imaging agent.

The initial human study of PiB was expanded to include 16 Alzheimer's disease subjects and 9 cognitively normal controls, the report of which was published in 2004 in the Annals of Neurology.

[2] This technique has been implicated in Alzheimer's disease research whereby scientists involved in this field are able to perform noninvasive in vivo neuroimaging studies using PET scans in brains of individuals with various degrees of dementia.

11C-PiB is a fluorescent derivative of thioflavin T which preferentially targets and binds to fibrillar Aβ forms found in dense core plaques with high affinity and specificity.

[5] The quantification of 11C-PiB has demonstrated to elicit a profound difference in neuronal cortical binding between individuals recognized with Alzheimer's disease and age-matched cognitively normal controls.

Image showing large areas of red and yellow in the "AD" brain on the left and no apparent red or yellow in the "Control" brain on the right.
This image shows a PiB-PET scan of a patient with Alzheimer's disease on the left and an elderly person with normal memory on the right. Areas of red and yellow show high concentrations of PiB in the brain and suggest high amounts of amyloid deposits in these areas.