Cardiotoxity is one of the most important adverse reactions of chemotherapy, significantly reducing cancer patient survival rates. Cardiotoxicity can appear at any stage during the disease and standard methods to detect it, such as echocardiography and heart ejection, are sensitive to late stage toxicity only, where the effects are likely to be irreversible.
Stuart McCluskey, an Imperial College London-Imanova sponsored PhD student, has been evaluating the use of a PET imaging agent to help detect early onset chemotherapy-induced cardiotoxicity, increasing the chances of reversing the damage. We hypothesis that a reduction in mitochondrial membrane potential within the heart will precede observable decreases in heart function. Therefore, PET imaging agents sensitive to changes in this potential may allow earlier diagnosis of cardiotoxicity, impacting treatment strategies. He will be presenting the potential of [18F]Mitophos, developed at Imanova, as a promising PET imaging agent at the following conferences:
“Preclinical evaluation of [18F]Mitophos_07 as an imaging agent for doxorubicin-induced cardiotoxicity”
- European Society for Molecular Imaging (ESMI) 5-7 April
- International Symposium on Radiopharmaceutical Sciences (ISRS) 14-19 May
- Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging Annual Meeting (SNMMI) 10 -14 June
Stuart’s work is collaboratively supervised by Prof Nick Long and Imanova scientists Dr Christophe Plisson and Dr Lisa Wells.