Highlights of the Molecular Therapeutics Program, led by John Minna, M.D., include strong interactions with the Cancer Center Disease Oriented Teams (DOTs) including Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPOREs) in lung cancer and kidney cancer and working groups in breast cancer and prostate cancer. Strength in cancer imaging as well as clinical trials of new cancer therapeutics have developed within this program.

This component heavily leverages Simmons Cancer Center’s organized disease-oriented teams and ensures interaction with clinicians, clinical researchers, and physician scientists working within their specific cancer type. Molecular imaging is essential to perform translational research of cancer that can take findings from the bench to the bed side and vice versa.

There are multiple identified new needs and opportunities for innovative imaging and metabolic investigative approaches for cancer using cyclotron-produced radiotracers. The availability of the Cyclotron and Radiochemistry Facility provides this group of users the cutting-edge PET imaging technology to achieve the goals in translational (“bench to bedside”) research of cancer for early diagnosis, prognosis, and noninvasive assessment of tumor clinical behavior and response to personalized medicine.

Specifically, this group of users has expressed their interests in using radiotracers for imaging “benign” and “malignant” phenotypes of cancer and for noninvasive and longitudinal assessment of phenotypic differences in expression of cell surface markers, metabolic differences, and signal transduction pathway activation differences. Coupling the cyclotron-produced isotopes (e.g. ¹¹C, ¹⁸F, ⁶⁴Cu, and ⁸⁹Zr) to various targeting ligands, monoclonal antibodies, or molecules that have been found or identified as demonstrated in other tumor situations would allow attacking these questions.  In addition, this group of users are interested in use of [¹⁸F]FLT to study cancer cell proliferation in correlation with gene expression profile of cancer derived from their microarray data; and [¹⁸F]FHBG to image promoter activity of multiple genes differentially expressed in different tumor tissues through an innovative “reporter gene/reporter probe” strategy by linking promoter of these genes to the reporter gene, HSV1-tk.They also would like to use [¹¹C]-methionine, a more specific and sensitive radiotracer than [¹⁸F]FDG to differentiate benign and malignant thoracic nodules/masses. They are also interested in using PET imaging for prognosis and personalized treatment of cancer.

Once cancer is detected, there are directly analogous needs and opportunities to develop novel imaging and metabolic phenotyping techniques to determine the prognosis of cancers and predict their response to specific therapies including standard doublet chemotherapy and newer targeted therapy. There are multiple studies amassing molecular data on tumors that will allow dividing cancers into clinically distinct groups as well as predicting which would respond to specific therapies. What is needed is to take this molecular information and translate it into the clinic by developing imaging approaches specific for the different molecular abnormalities, which has been made possible upon the setup of the Cyclotron and Radiochemistry Facility.