The European Journal of Nuclear Medicine presents its annual award for Best Science Paper to the scientist who developed the image-enhancing drug. The scientist's name is Dr. Hank F. Kung, chief of radiopharmaceutical chemistry at Penn. Since Parkinson's patients have a dramatic loss of dopamine transporters, finding a safe drug that can illuminate them is of profound importance for diagnosing the disease. Early results indicate that the drug passes through the blood-brain barrier, even though it's been labeled with technetium, and that's a difficult feat. It's very difficult for a drug company to develop a neurodegenerative detection agent, because they could not open up everybody's brain.
Neurodegenerative disease is a very slow process, hard to evaluate.
By making this readily available, it will provide a very useful tool for developing a drug that will fight neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's. In fact, he says, the highest concentration of dopamine transporters he has seen was in a woman who was still lactating, shortly after the cessation of breast-feeding. Anecdotal observation for millennia suggests that they're more difficult to perturb, harder to rattle, when they're breast-feeding. Mozley also notes that a new Brazilian drug known as Sygen is now being tested by colleagues at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and has shown promising results thus far. By acting as his own guinea pig in a foreign country, Kung avoided the FDA's restrictions on testing a drug on humans before it has been proven safe.