Molecular Imaging: A Driving Force in Future Tense
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Imaging is Key to Future Cancer Research
"The ability to detect, through imaging, the molecular changes associated with a tumor cell will improve our ability to detect and stage tumors, select appropriate treatments, monitor the effectiveness of a treatment, and determine prognosis."
– Ellen Feigal, MD
Acting Director
Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis
National Cancer Institute |
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While the Human Genome Project has yielded a wealth of information for mapping the human body, it doesn't explain how the body works. Molecular imaging fills in the gaps. This technology combines molecular agents with powerful new imaging tools to capture pictures of specific molecular pathways in the body, particularly those that are key targets in disease processes. Molecular imaging has the unique ability to simultaneously find, diagnose, and treat disease inside the body, as well as assess the disease-stopping impact of particular treatments. Here's what molecular imaging promises:
- Detecting Disease
In the future, advances in molecular imaging will lead to the development of a broader array of imaging probes that will cover all the body's major systems and associated disease types, making even earlier detection of disease possible. See NIH.
- Aiding Treatment
Today's scientists are not just looking at specific molecules, but are also evaluating the components within the nucleus of their cells. They are learning what causes the cells to turn on and off, what makes them do what they do and how their fundamental function can be boosted or shut down. While molecular imaging has significantly advanced oncology, cardiology, neurology, infectious disease detection and therapy, drug development, and disease treatment, even more is expected.
- Cancer
Molecular imaging is now used to track the growth of a cancerous tumor, but also can ensure that various therapies treat only the cancer cells, avoiding the toxic effects of treatment on the patient's healthy tissue. In the future, molecular imaging is expected to aid in identifying the presence of drug-resistant genes that will enable clinicians to pre-determine which treatment regimens will be most effective within an hour of initiating treatment. This will help minimize ineffective as well as inappropriate treatments and avoid delays in optimizing a patient's therapy. In addition, molecular tracers, or radiopharmaceuticals, will be used to create diagnostic images which visually indicate whether cancer patients are susceptible to multi-drug resistance, a condition in which the defensive response to one type of chemotherapy also diminishes the potency of other chemo agents.
- Enabling Nano Treatments
Researchers are working to integrate molecular imaging with nanotechnologies (human-made, molecular-size structures or machines) to detect disease and enable even more precise therapy – perhaps eliminating the need for surgery entirely. For example, with biosensors providing the exact location of disease, new nanotechnologies will emerge that, when dispatched in the body, will deliver drug therapies directly to cancerous cells, affixing themselves to those specific cells and releasing cancer-killing agents. Alternatively, nanotechnologies will be designed to self-assemble at the appropriate time and implant themselves to repair bones or tears and even grow new blood vessels or tissue such as heart muscle. During all of these processes, imaging technologies will monitor the process, ensure that it is working properly, and measure the results. Aided by molecular imaging, nanotechnologies could also be used to treat diseases such as diabetes, which cost the U.S. $132 billion in direct health expenditures and lost productivity.1
1 "Economic Cost of Diabete in the U.S. in 2002," American Diabetes Association at http://www.diabetes.org, accessed February 2, 2004.
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