Skip to main content

New Drug Approvals 2013 - Pt. XVII - Flutemetamol F18 (VizamylTM)

By

ATC Code: V09AX04

On October 25th, the FDA approved Flutemetamol F18 (Tradename: Vizamyl; Research Code: [18F]AH110690 ), a radioactive diagnostic agent, for intravenous (i.v.) use in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging of the brain in adult patients with cognitive impairment, who are being evaluated for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and dementia.

Alzheimer's disease is a non-treatable, progressively worsening and fatal disease, characterised by a decrease in cognitive functions, such as memory, and is usually associated with an accumulation of β amyloid (Uniprot: P05067) plaques in several brain regions. These deposits are believed to be responsible for cellular damage and ultimately cell death.

Flutemetamol F18 is the second approved diagnostic drug to estimate β-amyloid neuritic plaque density, after the approval of Florbetapir F18 in 2012. Like Florbetapir F18, Flutemetamol F18 binds to β amyloid plaques in the brain where the F-18 isotope produces a positron signal that can be detected by a PET scanner. The advantages of this compound over its predecessor are: exposure to a lower dose of radiation; and more time for PET image acquisition (20 vs. 10 minutes). In in vitro binding studies using postmortem human brain homogenates containing fibrillar β amyloid, the dissociation constant (Kd) for flutemetamol was 6.7 nM.

It is worth mentioning, that a positive scan, indicating the presence of β amyloid deposits, it's not enough to diagnose a patient with Alzheimer's disease, since these protein deposits can also be present in patients with other types of dementia, or in elderly people without any neurological disease. However, a negative scan, where little or none β-amyloid plaques can be detected, indicates that the cause for dementia is probably not due to Alzheimer's disease.


Flutemetamol F18 (IUPAC Name: 2-[3-fluoranyl-4-(methylamino)phenyl]-1,3-benzothiazol-6-ol; Canonical smiles: CNc1ccc(cc1[18F])c2nc3ccc(O)cc3s2 ; ChEMBL: CHEMBL2042122; PubChem: 15950376; ChemSpider: 13092196; Standard InChI Key: VVECGOCJFKTUAX-HUYCHCPVSA-N) is a synthetic small molecule with a radioactive isotope of fluorine (18F), with a molecular weight of 274.3 Da, 3 hydrogen bond acceptors, 2 hydrogen bond donors, and has an ALogP of 3.61. The compound is therefore fully compliant with the rule of five.

Flutemetamol F18 is available as a radioactive solution for intravenous injection and the recommended imaging dose is 185 megabecquerels (MBq) [5 millicuries(mCi)] in a total volume of 10 mL or less. Following intravenous injection, the plasma concentrations declines by approximately 75% in the first 20 minutes post-injection, and by approximately 90% in the first 180 minutes. Flutemetamol F18 metabolites are primarily excreted via the hepatobiliary (52%) and the renal system (37%).

The license holder for VizamylTM is GE Healthcare, and the full prescribing information can be found here.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New SureChEMBL announcement

By
(Generated with DALL-E 3 ∙ 30 October 2023 at 1:48 pm) We have some very exciting news to report: the new SureChEMBL is now available! Hooray! What is SureChEMBL, you may ask. Good question! In our portfolio of chemical biology services, alongside our established database of bioactivity data for drug-like molecules ChEMBL , our dictionary of annotated small molecule entities ChEBI , and our compound cross-referencing system UniChem , we also deliver a database of annotated patents! Almost 10 years ago , EMBL-EBI acquired the SureChem system of chemically annotated patents and made this freely accessible in the public domain as SureChEMBL. Since then, our team has continued to maintain and deliver SureChEMBL. However, this has become increasingly challenging due to the complexities of the underlying codebase. We were awarded a Wellcome Trust grant in 2021 to completely overhaul SureChEMBL, with a new UI, backend infrastructure, and new f
Post a Comment
Read more

Improved querying for SureChEMBL

By
    Dear SureChEMBL users, Earlier this year we ran a survey to identify what you, the users, would like to see next in SureChEMBL. Thank you for offering your feedback! This gave us the opportunity to have some interesting discussions both internally and externally. While we can't publicly reveal precisely our plans for the coming months (everything will be delivered at the right time), we can at least say that improving the compound structure extraction quality is a priority. Unfortunately, the change won't happen overnight as reprocessing 167 millions patents takes a while. However, the good news is that the new generation of optical chemical structure recognition shows good performance, even for patent images! We hope we can share our results with you soon. So in the meantime, what are we doing? You may have noticed a few changes on the SureChEMBL main page. No more "Beta" flag since we consider the system to be stable enough (it does not mean that you will never
Post a Comment
Read more

ChEMBL brings drug bioactivity data to the Protein Data Bank in Europe

By
In the quest to develop new drugs, understanding the 3D structure of molecules is crucial. Resources like the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe) and the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) provide these 3D blueprints for many biological molecules. However, researchers also need to know how these molecules interact with their biological target – their bioactivity. ChEMBL is a treasure trove of bioactivity data for countless drug-like molecules. It tells us how strongly a molecule binds to a target, how it affects a biological process, and even how it might be metabolized. But here's the catch: while ChEMBL provides extensive information on a molecule's activity and cross references to other data sources, it doesn't always tell us if a 3D structure is available for a specific drug-target complex. This can be a roadblock for researchers who need that structural information to design effective drugs. Therefore, connecting ChEMBL data with resources like PDBe and CSD is essen
Post a Comment
Read more

ChEMBL & SureChEMBL anniversary symposium

By
  In 2024 we celebrate the 15th anniversary of the first public release of the ChEMBL database as well as the 10th anniversary of SureChEMBL. To recognise this important landmark we are organising a two-day symposium to celebrate the work achieved by ChEMBL and SureChEMBL, and look forward to its future.   Save the date for the ChEMBL 15 Year Symposium October 1-2, 2024     Day one will consist of four workshops, a basic ChEMBL drug design workshop; an advanced ChEMBL workshop (EUbOPEN community workshop); a ChEMBL data deposition workshop; and a SureChEMBL workshop. Day two will consist of a series of talks from invited speakers, a few poster flash talks, a local nature walk, as well as celebratory cake. During the breaks, the poster session will be a great opportunity to catch up with other users and collaborators of the ChEMBL resources and chat to colleagues, co-workers and others to find out more about how the database is being used. Lunch and refreshments will be pro
Post a Comment
Read more

ChEMBL 34 is out!

By
We are delighted to announce the release of ChEMBL 34, which includes a full update to drug and clinical candidate drug data. This version of the database, prepared on 28/03/2024 contains:         2,431,025 compounds (of which 2,409,270 have mol files)         3,106,257 compound records (non-unique compounds)         20,772,701 activities         1,644,390 assays         15,598 targets         89,892 documents Data can be downloaded from the ChEMBL FTP site:  https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/chembl/ChEMBLdb/releases/chembl_34/ Please see ChEMBL_34 release notes for full details of all changes in this release:  https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/chembl/ChEMBLdb/releases/chembl_34/chembl_34_release_notes.txt New Data Sources European Medicines Agency (src_id = 66): European Medicines Agency's data correspond to EMA drugs prior to 20 January 2023 (excluding vaccines). 71 out of the 882 newly added EMA drugs are only authorised by EMA, rather than from other regulatory bodies e.g.
Post a Comment
Read more