AC Immune Clinical Data Published in Nature Communications Show Alpha-Synuclein PET Tracer ACI-12589 Has Potential as Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnostic

PRESS RELEASE

AC Immune Clinical Data Published in Nature Communications Show Alpha-Synuclein PET Tracer ACI-12589 Has Potential as Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnostic

• ACI-12589¹ delivers the first element of a precision medicine approach by enabling early and accurate diagnosis of a-syn pathology in certain diseases
• Clinical trial of ACI-12589 showed a specific and reproducible retention pattern in patients with MSA, a rare and difficult-to-diagnose neurodegenerative disease
• ACI-12589 promises to catalyze accelerated development and targeted treatment of MSA and other a-synucleinopathies such as genetic Parkinson’s disease (PD)
  
  

Lausanne, Switzerland, October 27, 2023 – AC Immune SA (NASDAQ: ACIU), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company pioneering precision medicine for neurodegenerative diseases, today announced the publication of a peer-reviewed paper in Nature Communications showing the ability of an alpha-synuclein (a-syn) positron emission tomography (PET) tracer to identify patients with multiple system atrophy (MSA).

The clinical trial of AC Immune’s wholly owned experimental a-syn PET tracer ACI-12589 was led by the team of Oskar Hansson MD, PhD, at Lund University and Skåne University Hospital, in collaboration with associates at InviCRO LLC, with the support of a grant from The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) for Parkinson’s Research.

The Nature Communications paper describes the first-in-human trial of ACI-12589 comparing healthy control subjects to patients with a-synucleinopathies and other neurological diagnoses. It concludes that ACI-12589 showed a specific and reproducible retention pattern in patients with MSA, indicating that the PET tracer could enable earlier, more accurate diagnosis of MSA and potentially, more precise monitoring of disease progression and responses to new a-syn targeted therapeutics in development.

Dr. Andrea Pfeifer, CEO of AC Immune SA, commented: “We are proud to have this paper showing the first-ever live images of a-syn in a living human brain published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal, Nature Communications. The data demonstrate that ACI-12589 could be an important diagnostic tool to identify, characterize and track the progression of a-syn pathology in MSA and evaluate the impact of therapeutic interventions. As the first imaging agent for a-syn, ACI-12589 represents a major step towards achieving AC Immune’s ambition of developing precision medicine for neurodegenerative diseases. We are grateful to our talented collaborators at Lund University and Skåne University Hospital and the MJFF for its continuing support for this important work.”