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2024 The Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund – PCF Challenge Award

Multicolor PET Imaging to Interrogate Prostate Cancer Biology

Principal Investigator: Jan Grimm, MD, PhD (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center)

Co-Investigators: Jason Lewis, PhD (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), Michael Morris, MD (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center)

Young Investigator: Karla Vazquez-Prada, PhD (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center)

Collaborators: Anis Hamid, MD (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center)

Description:

  • PET (Positron Emission Tomography) is a whole-body imaging technology which uses a radioactive probe specifically taken up by tumor cells to visualize tumor locations in the body. PET imaging is used to determine whether a patient with cancer has developed metastatic disease, the location and extent of metastatic disease, and to guide treatment decisions.
  • PET is a monochromatic technology. As prostate cancer advances, it becomes highly variable – but there is no single PET probe that can visualize all metastases in patients with the most aggressive and lethal forms of prostate cancer. Currently, patients who need multiple types of PET scans must undergo several different PET imaging sessions, which is highly time-consuming, expensive, and increases patients’ radioactivity exposure from the accompanying CT scans.
  • In this project, Dr. Grimm and team will utilize novel physics principles and computer algorithms in multi-color PET scanning, which is able to image two different PET probes simultaneously (instead of the usual one tracer) using standard PET machines. 
  • Dr. Grimm and team will combine PSMA PET with either FDG PET (a common cancer PET probe which is only useful in some highly advanced prostate cancers), FDHT PET which targets the androgen receptor (AR), or with a PET probe targeting DLL3, a marker expressed by one of the most aggressive forms of prostate cancer, neuroendocrine prostate cancer (NEPC).
  • These dual PET combinations will be investigated in mouse models of prostate cancer, to optimize this technology and to study how tumor expression of these PET probe markers change during disease progression and in response to prostate cancer treatments.
  • The team will also develop novel PET probes to study different types of immune cells in the tumor microenvironment, including tumor-promoting and anti-tumor immune cell types. 
  • If successful, this project will develop a new whole-body tumor imaging technology, “multicolor PET,” that can better assess the complete picture of metastatic disease, diagnose aggressive forms of prostate cancer, help to select optimal therapies and monitor treatment responses, and better understand disease biology.

What this means to patients: There is an urgent need to better diagnose, monitor, and select treatments for patients with advanced prostate cancer using noninvasive methods. Dr. Grimm and team are developing a applying a novel PET imaging technology that can visualize more than one PET probe at a time. This will greatly improve diagnosis of advanced forms of prostate cancer and help to optimize treatment for patients.