Research Opportunities

The Nuclear Medicine department offers excellent conditions and opportunities for research. Two types of research can be conducted.

In house clinical projects evaluating new radionuclides. An example is the evaluation of a new 18F-labelled agent for CAD.

Use of facilities for clinical research that requires Nuclear Medicine procedures, especially those requiring18F-PET/CT. In house interpretation of images is provided in these cases.

Research projects where the efficacy of drugs is evaluated with Nuclear Medicine techniques. In these cases, since studies may require centralized image interpretation, technical support only in the form of patient imaging and transmission of data is provided. Two research studies evaluating the effect of new drugs have been completed in the last two years and a new third one is about to begin.

The Nuclear Medicine department has highly experienced staff, faculty and technologists. It has a broad scope license from the Ohio Department of Health which means that just about any radioisotope or radiopharmaceutical can be used for clinical and/or research applications.In addition, a formal radiation safety committee is in place which meets every 4 months. A dedicated health physics expert functions as our Radiation Safety Officer.

Other features include:

• ACR accreditation of all of our imaging equipment
• Quantitative brain software
• Archival and image transmission through McKesson PACS
• The Nuclear Medicine Department is closely integrated with the University of Cincinnati’s Investigational Review Board (IRB)
• Enrollment into the Society of Nuclear Medicine Clinical Trials Network (CTN) for research

The CTN grew from the need for streamlines drug discovery through the integration of imaging biomarkers into multi-center clinical trials while promoting and supporting standardization in imaging across clinical sites through an evolving educational curriculum.

The use of imaging in clinical trials scan can help pharmaceutical developers determine earlier in the development process whether a new product is clinically promising, accelerating the development of promising compounds and eliminating those without apparent patient benefit earlier in the development cycle.

The newest clinical trial is based on PET scanning with a new biomarker, 18F-FLT (fluorothymidine). The clinical trial will commence soon and evaluate 18F-FLT for the following:

• The potential for demonstrating tumor proliferation
• The potential as a surrogate marker for evaluating investigation oncology therapeutics as well as existing therapeutics
• As broadly applicable to lung, breast, esophageal, GI, brain, lymphoma
• To document the safety profile of 18F-FLT