Biography
Suzanne Baker got her bachelor degree in Biomedical engineering from Tulane University and her PhD in Vision Science from University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on methods development in brain positron emission tomography (PET) in aging and dementia. Her primary interests are tracer evaluation, pharmacokinetic modeling, harmonizing multi-site data, reference region analysis, between tracer comparison and partial volume correction. She serves as the PET core for many multi-center studies. She has performed preliminary evaluation of Flortaucipir and JNJ067 tau PET tracers. She consults for Genentech on their tau PET tracer. She recently was awarded a $40 million NIH grant to compare Flortaucipir and MK6240 tau PET tracers in a head-to-head cohort, which will include comparisons to measurements of tau in plasma.

Talk
Considerations in methods for tau PET quantification
A useful PET tracer has high affinity for the protein of interest and has none-to-low binding to anything else. In aging and dementia, the correlation of tau accumulation with cognitive decline makes it an interesting target for therapies. Here Ill explore methods of amplifying the signal and decreasing the noise.