Todd Sasser, head of Applications Americas & Senior NMI Applications Specialist at Bruker discusses how imaging techniques are helping drug developers better target tumours in cancer patients.
Oncology
Preclinical imaging plays a crucial role in understanding how the body works in both healthy and diseased states, and in describing responses to physiological or environmental changes. It provides important insights into disease processes at organ, tissue, cell, and molecular levels. Such knowledge informs the development of novel therapeutic strategies, which in turn improve patient outcomes and save lives. Preclinical imaging is also central to evaluating the effectiveness and safety of new treatments and describing drug distribution patterns before clinical use.
Cost-efficient and high-throughput longitudinal study of animal models can be achieved using anatomical evaluation techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT), alongside positron emission tomography (PET) and single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) for molecular visualisations. Small animal studies are necessary to explore and validate imaging agents in the preclinical phase, before beginning clinical trials. In this context, PET imaging is increasingly being used by researchers in the translational drug development phase as it provides data that can be extrapolated from animal to human studies.