PET May Reduce, Eliminate Prolonged Drug Development Trials

Various recent studies assessing small animal imaging with the use of positron emission tomography (PET) are providing new insights into the treatment of human disease.

A big advantage of small animal imaging "is the ability to carry out many studies at various time points with the same animal,” remarked Michael J. Welch, Ph.D., co-author of a paper published in the April 2005 issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. Dr Welch is co-director of the division of radiological sciences at Washington University's Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology (St. Louis, MO, USA). He explained that research on the same living animal can be stretched over a period of time, allowing scientists to track the development of disease in one subject and to assess the effects of treatments of disease progression and outcome.

Vital information can be obtained noninvasively, quantitatively, and repeatedly in the same animal, according to Dr. Welch. With PET imaging of small animals, one can very quickly assess new radiopharmaceutical agents using a small number of animals and possibly eliminate the need for biopsies, extending an animal's life.

PET offers a noninvasive look into an individual's living biology as it monitors a variety of biologic mechanisms including metabolism, gene expression, and drug activity. A smaller version of a PET scanner was developed to image small animals in the same manner. Small animals, in particular mice, play an essential role in the study of human biology and disease. Mice have almost the same set of genes as humans, which can lead to a further understanding about the function of many genes shared by both, leading to a further insights into the diagnosis of disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

Small animal imaging can considerably reduce the practical assessment time for therapeutic agents, potentially hastening the way for more innovative drug therapy for patients, according to Dr. Welch. He estimates that there may be as many as 12,000 private and academic animal imaging laboratories in the world today, and that more than 200 may conduct small animal PET scanning routinely.

Dr. Welch and coworkers are also studying the effect of cancer therapies on tumor function and are performing cardiac studies to examine drugs that reverse the disease process in animals.




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