Watching Cancer Glow Away

In recent years, noninvasive techniques for imaging the response of tumors to therapy have moved upstream from diagnostic to drug development settings. However, commonly used techniques like MRI provide only structural information, such as tumor volume, which is not always an accurate readout of a compound's efficacy. Functional imaging techniques like fluorodeoxyglucose PET provide a more accurate readout of tumor response by tracking biochemical processes on or within tumor cells. But functional imaging agents are expensive to produce, which limits their use.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center have identified a functional imaging agent that is easier to produce than existing agents and just as effective at monitoring the response of tumors to therapy, as reported in Nature Medicine. The research team described a seven-residue peptide biomarker that differentiated between tumors that did and did not respond to treatment with a VEGF tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI).¹...