Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles have received a $2.6 million grant to develop what they've termed a "plug-and-play" platform that could greatly simplify and speed up the creation of new PET radiotracers.
The four-year award from the U.S. National Institutes of Health will fund a team at the Keck School of Medicine of USC led by Kai Chen, PhD. The platform integrates two advanced chemistry approaches into a miniaturized device that could lower the cost and complexity of tracer production, according to the group.
“These findings are important because they show that click chemistry can rapidly generate tracers for multiple cancer biomarkers and that these tracers can be produced on a very small scale,” Chen said, in a news release from the university.
Click chemistry is a Nobel Prize-winning technique for rapidly joining molecules together. The researchers combined this technique with droplet radiochemistry, which carries out reactions in extremely small droplets, the group noted. The two approaches feed into a chip-based device roughly the size of a coffee cup that combines a universal radioactive building block with different biological targeting molecules to rapidly produce new tracers, they added.
Preliminary work suggests the approach can generate tracers targeting fibroblast activation protein, which is elevated in many tumors, as well as markers for liver and prostate cancer, the team said.
“Because everything will be concentrated on a tiny chip, we hope to produce radiotracers quickly and efficiently with less reliance on traditional large-scale equipment and facilities,” Chen said.
Over the next one to two years, Chen's team plans to optimize the device and benchmark new tracers against established ones. Quality control, preclinical testing, and steps toward clinical application will follow, with potential adaptation beyond oncology to neurological disease imaging, the group added.
"The funded project will further develop the platform and test it with a broader range of cancer-targeted tracers," Chen said.
