On the front line of fighting cancer with theranostic tracers (May 2020)

June 2, 2020

In this issue

Featured story: Scientist in the Spotlight
Preclinical Concurrent PET/SPECT: the straightway to patients?
Under the hood of Collimated (Preclinical) PET
Virtual Edition of the SNMMI 2020 Annual Meeting

Scientist in the Spotlight: Prof. Marion de Jong, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam

As one of the trailblazers in theranostic imaging, Marion de Jong, Ph.D., heads the TRACER group at the renowned Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She leads the department of development of preclinical and translational evaluation of new probes for theranostic applications.

In a recent interview, Marion de Jong elaborates on the evolution and development of the theranostic radionuclide approach to the management of NETs and offers her view on the use of MILabs’ equipment and other preclinical techniques for expansion of the theranostic principles such as targeted alpha therapy into other oncology indications.

Preclinical Concurrent PET/SPECT: the straightway to patients?

Simultaneous imaging with MILabs VECTor PET/SPECT/CT gives researchers the unique ability to compare PET, SPECT, and radiotherapy isotopes in the same animal under identical physiological and physical conditions. For the first time, PET and SPECT images can now be acquired with the same spatial and temporal resolutions.

This greatly facilitates and accelerates switching from preclinical SPECT to clinical PET and theranostics imaging. For further reading: in-vivo immunohistochemistry, tumor microenvironment theranostics, and translation from SPECT to PET to theranostics imaging.

Under the hood of Collimated (Preclinical) PET

All PET systems, whether clinical or preclinical, use collimated detection technology. The so-called electronic or coincidence-based collimation works very well for imaging humans because the single-photon events need to travel quite some distance so that time-of-flight (TOF) measurements can be used to calculate the actual origin of photon emission.

As a result, the application of TOF has significantly improved the resolution and clarity of human PET images. However, TOF does not work for imaging small animals, therefore since 2003, various industry groups have developed alternative photon detection PET technologies based on physical collimation and image magnification. This has ultimately resulted in the development of ultra-high definition PET, called U-PET by MILabs. This development curve is analog to what happened in the microscopy field, where the use of confocal scanning is applied to overcome the limitations of widefield microscopy.
Similarly, image clearing by magnified physical collimation yields higher resolution, low noise micro-PET images, and can even perform multi-isotope PET and positron range-free PET.For further reading: MILabs VECTor: simultaneous PET-SPECT.

Virtual Edition of the SNMMI 2020 Annual Meeting

As an exhibitor and gold sponsor, MILabs will participate in the virtual edition of the SNMMI meeting, July 11-14, 2020. We will highlight our multimodal synergistic imaging platform, including PET, SPECT, 2D/3D Optical, and CT modalities.

All modalities are available as stand-alone units or integrated on a multimodality platform in any combination, enabling to explore new preclinical applications with outstanding image clarity.
For more information, here is the YouTube video of the event, or the event website.