In the past decades, there has been significant advancement in our understanding of cellular and molecular immune response in a diverse range of biomedical disease processes. Auto-immune and pro-inflammatory disease processes can be associated with chronic conditions such as inflammatory bowel disorder. Further, new cancer immunotherapies activate a patient’s immune system, trigger signaling pathways, and mobilize targeted immune system activity. Cytokines play a key role in this immune response cascade and in determining the type of response (e.g. Type 1/2).
Current techniques for staging clinical disease progress with these underlying inflammatory processes are limited and largely rely on invasive detection of macroscopic cellular and organ tissue damage. Further, while some immunotherapy cancer treatments are showing good efficacy, there is still a need for improved techniques to verify host response activation at the earliest point possible to inform ongoing treatment strategies.
Cytokine PET may enable detection of these processes in even early-stage disease and in a non-invasive and localized fashion. We will review our work in the development of PET agents targeting cytokines in preclinical disease models and assessment of tumor response to immunotherapy and inflammatory diseases.
Thursday, 29 February 2024, 17:00 CET | 11:00 EST
This topic will be relevant to researchers involved in inflammatory disease, PET tracer development, cancer therapies and specifically nuclear imaging specialists, immunologists, and cancer biologists.
Dr. Nerissa Viola
Associate Professor, Oncology, School of Medicine, Wayne State University
Program Leader, Molecular Imaging, Karmanos Cancer Institute