Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects

New breast cancer drugs are increasingly targeted to specific proteins involved in cancer progression, such as the epidermal growth factor receptor (HER2). These new drugs typically benefit only a small proportion of patients, at very high cost to the health care system (over $40,000 per patient per year for Herceptin, which targets HER2). Physicians need information about whether a drug target is present in patients' tumours before selecting these expensive treatments. The presence of a predictive protein, also called a biomarker, can be determined by taking a tumour biopsy using special laboratory techniques. However, it is often impossible to biopsy tumours that have spread, and biomarker content may vary from one tumour site to another. Molecular imaging technologies such as positron emission tomography combined with computed tomography (PET/CT) can be a powerful, non invasive tool to detect biomarkers, using extremely low concentrations of radioactive probes. The purpose of this project is to develop novel radioisotope production technologies used for PET/CT imaging. With these radioisotopes, the project will develop new imaging agents that will allow physicians to find out if patients express a variant of HER2 that is associated with resistance to the current drug used to treat HER2 positive breast cancers. The radioisotopes of interest are called zirconium-89, gallium-68, yttrium-86 and scandium-44. Many of these radioisotopes are currently unavailable in Canada. The traditional production methods to make them involve the use of solid targets, which are irradiated by a cyclotron, but this approach requires specific equipment and expertise unavailable in most facilities. Our multidisciplinary team of experts, along with our collaborators and industrial partner, will conduct theoretical simulation of radioisotope production yields, design new salt-solution targets to make the radioisotopes, optimize the production conditions of these radioisotopes, develop methods to separate and purify them, and attach the isotopes to