Researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in Nijmegen, Netherlands, have presented a study that detailed the successful utilization of in vivo PET and SPECT molecular imaging techniques in animal subjects with triple-negative breast cancer to better enable patient selection for targeted therapies.
Researchers used the preclinical imagers U-SPECT from MILabs of Utrecht, the Netherlands, and Inveon PET from Siemens Healthcare of Knoxville, TN, in the in vivo portion of the study, which was presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting in Washington, DC.
The purpose of the research was to develop a noninvasive method of visualizing the insulinlike growth factor 1 receptor, IGF-1R, which is expressed by 30% to 40% of patients with triple-negative breast cancer, thus making them uniquely identifiable and able to be treated with IGF-1R antibodies, according to Siemens.
Dr. Otto Boerman from the nuclear medicine department at the medical center said the use of molecular imaging techniques, such as PET and SPECT, has been helpful in the progression of research toward finding molecular targets to visualize IGF-1R. In the future, the ability to visualize the receptor may enable more effective patient selection from the triple-negative breast cancer patient population for IGF-1R targeted therapy, he said.
The researchers concluded that indium-111 R1507 SPECT and zirconium-89 R1507 PET are excellent methods to visualize IGF-1R expression in vivo in triple-negative breast cancer xenografts.
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