Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The Researchers propose to work together with MDS-Nordion to add value to their growing line of Nuclear Medicine radiometals. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Single Photon Emission Tomography (SPECT) are two imaging modalities that our aging population will depend upon for the early detection of disease, particularly in the area of oncology. PET has become the ""gold standard"" in the early detection of cancer which currently relies on the use of fluoro-deoxy-glucose (FDG). It is crucial to the health of Canadians that new promising radiopharmaceuticals, more specific for disease processes, be developed for both PET and SPECT. In order to achieve this goal new radiolabelling methods and chemistry must be developed. The sales of imaging agents alone have been projected to be at a 5 billion dollar market world-wide by 2009, with imaging agents for Positron Emission Tomography (PET) representing the fastest growing class of agents. Much of this advancement is being made possible by the synthetic production of biomolecules (e.g. peptides, lipids, oligosaccharides, oligonucleotides and antibodies) with specific and high affinity for cancer biomarkers. However the development of these ligands into viable imaging agents has not yet been realized due to the lack of a robust, reproducible, high-yielding and rapid method for introducing the radioisotope of choice into these biomolecules to give chemically stable entities. The researchers propose to develop the chemistry to incorporate two of these radiometals, Ga-68 and In-111, into biological molecules such as Peptides, Proteins, Oligonucleotides, Carbohydrates and Fatty Acids and to evaluate their biological properties as potential imaging or therapy agents. They intend to expand on the radiochemistry already developed in their labs to prepare coordination chelate derivatives that can be used to label a wide variety of target compounds.