Agathe Vrillon, MD, PhD, came to UCSF in the summer of 2023 as an Altantic Fellow in Brain Health Equity at GBHI. She joined our lab to work wiht her GBHI mentor Renaud La Joie, and stayed with us for 6 months after the end of her year-long GBHI adventure.
During her time in the lab, Agathe worked on a project looking at tau PET with Flortaucipir in patients with available autopsy information. Her work is an extension of prior work led by David Soleimani-Meigooni (see paper in Brain on the first 20 patients with available data). Collaborating with our ADRC Neuropathology core, she was able to gather data from 73 participants with ante mortem Flortaucipir PET and neuropathology data. Most of these individuals had underlying AD or Fronto-Temporal Lobar Degeneration at autopsy, and 56 of them had plasma p-tau217 quantified using Simoa (Janssen). Her work was presented at HAI 2025 and was just published in Neurology.
Briefly, Agathe showed that both Flortaucipir PET and p-tau217 were
- highly sensitive and specific to detect high AD neuropathological changes / NFT Braak stage V/VI
- not detecting non-AD tau
