From the June 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


“The therapy is really a cancer-targeted therapy, which means that it really hits the tumor cells and is not affecting normal tissue, [as] opposed to chemotherapy, which affects all dividing cells,” Baum adds.

What about other cancers?
In 2013, 232,924 people in the U.S. were diagnosed with breast cancer, 212,584 with lung cancer and 136,119 with colon cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There aren’t any markers specific enough to be used to treat those cancers. F-18 FDG, which is the main radiopharmaceutical used for PET/CT imaging, is an unspecific biomarker, says Baum.

“It just tells you that the cancer cells [have] increased metabolism,” says Baum. “It is very sensitive to find the disease, but it cannot determine if it’s a breast cancer cell, lung cancer cell or lymphoma cell because they all take up FDG very heavily.”

Since most tumors don’t express cancer cell-specific receptors, there is an increasing need to find other ways to deliver image-guided targeted molecular medicine. Sources such as metabolism, angiogenesis, inflammation, the tumor microenvironment and stromal cell receptors are being explored, according to a study published in the European Journal of Radiology.

The researchers concluded that although cancer cell receptors are the easiest targets for theranostics, future areas will include targeting specific microenvironments, cancer stem cells and imaging, and targeting preventive microenvironmental niches for cancer stem cells.

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