NVLS / FMAU

Cancer is the leading cause of death in both women and men in the United States. There is a critical demand for the development of novel techniques which are able to early detect cancer and accurately evaluate treatment efficacy. Despite the improvements in structural and functional imaging, responses of anti-cancer treatment are still being assessed on the basis of measurement of tumor size before and after treatment. As targeted chemotherapies, especially early on, may not cause significant changes in the size of lesions, early assessment of response to such treatments may not be accurate using conventional size measurement. Therefore, a clinically applicable technique which can demonstrate the anti-cancer effect of a drug at earlier stage will be very useful for evaluating treatment response.

The goal of this proposal is to develop a platform of using a novel positron emission tomography (PET) tracer, first developed in our laboratory, to assess chemotherapeutic response in preclinical animal models and in clinical cancer patients. Preliminary studies of our FMAU PET tracer showed very promising results in detecting tumors in cancer patients without treatment. The success of our proposed study will provide a better understanding of basic biological mechanisms of chemotherapeutic treatment in cancer, allow the evaluation of cancer disease course and chemotherapeutic efficacy at the earliest stage of anti-cancer treatment, and improve overall patient outcome and help further steps toward personalized medicine.