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Molecular imaging techniques provide valuable information about the presence of specific drug targets on cancer cells and are useful in cancer clinical trials and clinical practice to provide an early assessment of tumor response to chemotherapy.

In clinical trials involving new anti-cancer drugs, tumor size and activity can be measured/monitored using imaging methods such as computed tomography (CT), which looks at the appearance of organs, and positron emission tomography (PET), which measures tumor function based on the accumulation of radioactive drugs called radiotracers. Gathering information from tumor DNA circulating in the blood is potentially another approach for cancer detection and the monitoring of cancer patients for treatment response and relapse and can enhance the ability to identify which patients are unlikely to benefit from a particular treatment.

This project successfully developed a prostate cancer PET image standard that can be used to calibrate imaging tools to maximize diagnostic sensitivity and reproducibility, and enhanced clinical management approaches for the early identification of persons at high risk of cancer disease relapse. They also developed methods to improve the accuracy of PET/CT in measuring viable tumor mass and assays to measure the levels of circulating tumor DNA.

Beyond this project work, the team is collecting additional data on circulating tumor DNA and correlating that with patient imaging information to determine whether the integration of genomic data can improve cancer patient management and the prediction of clinical outcomes.