ANSTO has acquired a leading diagnostic tool - a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imager - to allow scientists to study the functional activity in key organs of the body. This will enable them to develop new diagnostics and treatments for diseases such as cancer and heart disease.
Carl Jung, a famous Swiss psychiatrist said: "Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart". At the time, he could not have imagined that a future technology would be developed to allow scientists to look, not only into our hearts, but other vital organs of the body.
The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) has acquired a leading diagnostic tool - a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imager - to allow scientists to study the functional activity in key organs of the body. This will enable them to develop new diagnostics and treatments for diseases such as cancer and heart disease.
A senior researcher at ANSTO's Radiopharmaceutical Research Institute, Dr Marie Gregoire, believes their new PET imager will help expand ANSTO's already impressive scientific research program.
"This new technology will help us understand the physiological processes of life-threatening diseases in the body, such as cancer and Alzheimer's," she said. "Only a few other medical research institutes have access to this type of technology which in our case is specifically tailored for animal research."
A PET facility is most commonly seen in major hospitals and is designed to image the human body, so takes up a whole room. However, at ANSTO the facility is much smaller because it is specifically designed to image animals. Marie was quick to point out that the benefit of PET at ANSTO is that no animals are harmed during experiments.
"With PET the subject is injected with a radiopharmaceutical which is tagged to the compound of interest in the body. The camera is designed to pick up the radioactive signals from the body which in turn forms an image telling us about the functional activity of a tumour or drug being studied," she explained. "As the process is non-invasive and we need to see results over time, it means that we do not need to sacrifice our animals for the research.
"The advantage of PET is that it produces images in colour. Differing degrees of brightness on a PET image represent different levels of tissue or organ function which can indicate a tumour growth or how well a treatment is performing."
A PET imager is more advanced than the common Computer Tomograph (CT) image.
The CT image provides anatomical pictures of the body, while PET reveals many different biochemical functions in real time, acting as a sort of molecular camera. Unlike CT, PET not only takes a snapshot of body structure, but it also watches what the body is doing.
"The PET technology will continually develop and in the future it could possibly locate and image a single cancer cell, long before it has become a tumour, meaning doctors can target and destroy it before it becomes a tumour and starts interfering with bodily functions," Marie explained.
Another senior researcher, Dr Andrew Katsifis, believes that the new PET imager will help ANSTO to develop new radiotracers that will improve the treatment of cancer.
"In the past, research regarding biochemical pathways had to be done using narrow images and this was a long and arduous process. Now the PET scanner provides us with a 'window into the body' with which to study human diseases," said Andrew.
At the moment, the research group's primary goal is to produce improved radiotracers for the imaging of the human body.
"However, the problem with the present radiotracer, 18Flurodeoxyglucose, is that it uses glucose to make an image but it is not specific enough; for example when imaging breast cancer, it will not image all the tumours in the breast, it can miss some," Andrew explained.
"With the brain, for example, glucose is the main fuel, the entire brain uses it and so the PET image will show activity in the brain and single out a tumour. Only in the most advanced cases of brain cancer can we distinguish between the tumour and the rest of the brain.
"The key is to develop specific radiotracers for each cancer, so that when a PET image is made we can make a firm diagnosis and develop a method of treatment, specifically tailored for that cancer."
The future for PET is definitely exciting. As well as cancer the ANSTO PET facility will help in research programs including studies into drug dependence - such as identifying which part of a brain is damaged by marijuana use, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. All thanks to a technology that lets us "look inside our hearts".
Published: 24/03/2008