Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine have secured two National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants to develop technologies for noninvasively examining and quantifying immune cells, specifically macrophages, within tumors. The grants are worth $6.7 million.
The density of macrophages signals an inflammatory response, and in a solid tumor their numbers can impact treatment, making counting them vital for determining effective therapies. For now, they can be hard to quantify without a biopsy.
The new noninvasive clinical method being developed, TAM-Sense, works by using an imaging agent made of minuscule droplets of a biologically inert fluorocarbon dye, dispersed into the bloodstream upon injection. The dye is attracted to macrophages at sites of inflammation. Modified MRI scanners detect the dye within macrophages, offering a patient experience akin to standard MRI scans.
“Visualizing a patient’s inflammatory sites throughout the body will be invaluable for accurate clinical diagnosis and for planning precise therapeutic interventions,” Eric Ahrens, PhD, a professor in the Department of Radiology at UC San Diego School of Medicine, said in an announcement. “Current approaches using biopsies are invasive, and some tumors are inaccessible to biopsy. There is an urgent need for new, whole-body imaging technologies.”
The approach will be tested in a phase I clinical study involving patients with recurrent head and neck tumors. Additionally, researchers plan to adapt TAM-Sense for use with PET scans to enable whole-body imaging.
Beyond cancer applications, TAM-Sense holds promise for diseases with inflammatory components, namely autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular diseases and infections.
“Right now, we’re testing one iteration of the technology in patients but there’s also a bigger story at play in terms of empowering MRI and PET with unprecedented precision, which could have wide-reaching implications for diagnostics as a whole,” Ahrens added.
The technique’s potential may possibly extend to pain management by pinpointing anatomical locations of inflammation. TAM-Sense is currently in early development and pre-clinical testing is required before its use in humans.
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