Truman Veterans’ Hospital has a new approach to detecting the precise spread of prostate cancer throughout the body.
The hospital can now use radiopharmaceutical peptides, chains of amino acids, to identify exactly where the disease has metastasized — or spread — throughout the body, a news release stated.
While the procedure to diagnose the cancer is not new, the veterans hospital now has the facilities to use it.
Timothy Hoffman, a research career scientist at the hospital and professor at the MU School of Medicine, and his team developed an in-house radiopharmacy to make a cancer-detecting drug that helps with the diagnosis.
The radiopharmacy allows the hospital to use a radiopharmaceutical peptide with a type of imaging — known as PET imaging — to show where the cancer has metastasized in the body.
When used alongside the imaging, the drug illuminates the scan to show the location of the disease, making it easier to identify where the cancer has spread.
That’s an improvement over the current imaging procedure, which doesn’t always show if and where the cancer has spread throughout the body, said Thomas Dresser, veterans hospital chief of nuclear medicine.
“The key to diagnostic precision is the use of an injectable radiopharmaceutical peptide designed for a specific cancer and used in conjunction with PET (positron emission tomography) imaging,” Dresser said.
The cancer-directed drug used to detect the disease in parts of the body can only be used for a short time after it is made, so it cannot be transported a long distance. The new radiopharmacy allows for on-site preparation of the peptides used in the procedure.
The efforts to create a radiopharmacy for the development of the drug has been successful, Hoffman said.
“As a result, three months ago, Truman VA became the first VA hospital in the U.S. to offer this level of care in-house,” Hoffman said in a news release. “Since then, we have participated in an FDA-approved phase III clinical trial where more than two dozen Veteran patients have benefited directly from this leading-edge care.”
The use of the cancer-specific radiopharmaceuticals and PET imaging together is expected to be approved nationwide within the next several months.
