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Imaging of pathological tau with positron emission tomography (PET) has the potential to allow early diagnosis of the dementias and monitoring of disease progression, including assessment of therapeutic interventions, in vivo. The first generation of tau PET tracers, including the carbazole flortaucipir and the 2-arylquinolines of the THK series, are now used in clinical research; however, concerns have been raised about off-target binding and low sensitivity.  With the aim to determine the nature of tau pathology depicted by structurally distinct tau ligands we carried out a microscopic neuropathological evaluation in  post-mortem  human brain tissue of cases with primary and secondary tauopathies. Carbazole and 2-arylquinoline binding was only observed in cases with Alzheimer’s disease and one case with frontotemporal dementia and parkinsonism linked to chromosome 17 exhibiting a R406W  MAPT  mutation. In end stage Alzheimer’s disease cases, fluorescent imaging with the carbazole T726 and the 2-arylquinoline THK-5117 revealed high inter- and intra-case variability of tracer binding, and this was corroborated by quantitative phosphorimaging with the PET tracer [ 18 F]THK-5117. Microscopic analysis of the pathological inclusions revealed that the fluorescent tracers preferentially bind to premature tau aggregates. Whilst T726 binding was limited to neuronal tau, THK-5117 additionally depicted neuritic tau. Neither tracer depicted tau in pre-symptomatic disease.  Our results highlight limitations of the first generation of tau PET tracers, in particular lack of correlation between pathological tau load and tracer binding, limited sensitivity to tau in early disease, and high variability in tracer binding between and within cases. Concerns remain that these limitations may also affect the next generation tracers as they target the same high affinity binding site. Therefore, it is crucial to assess inter- and intra-subject correlation of tracer binding with pathological tau load in  post-mortem  tissue studies, and to rigorously assess novel tau PET tracers before translation into clinical studies.   Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (10.1186/s40478-018-0535-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Large inter- and intra-case variability of first generation tau PET ligand binding in neurodegenerative dementias