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Take a deep (radioactive) breath |
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You're a big pharma company with an 'inhalable' drug that could make you millions, but you need to know where it ends up in the body. Who do you call? Aussie nuclear imaging company PharmaScint - that's who.
Pharmaceuticals are big biz, and a boom area in the drug industry is delivering drugs by inhalation. Inhalation is easier and less painful than injection, and offers big quality of life gains for chronic disease sufferers who need daily needles - such as diabetics.
But inhalers (the devices used to inhale drugs) are tricky - you need to know where your drugs are going in the lungs and how much is being absorbed. To figure that out, you need some wicked imaging technology and expertise.
Enter PharmaScint, a nuclear imaging company and brainchild of three University of Sydney researchers. PharmaScint specialises in 3D imaging of respiratory drug delivery, using radioactive tracers and a device called a gamma camera to visualise precisely where in the body an inhaled drug ends up.
Gamma cameras are designed to detect the gamma rays emitted by decaying radioisotopes. Using a technique known as SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography), the PharmaScint team take multiple 2D 'slices' of a patient and reconstruct them into a 3D model showing the location of the radioactive tracer.
The pharmaceutical industry is very interested in this kind of 3D imaging, because it provides crucial information about how effectively a drug is reaching its target in the body.
"The way the pharmaceutical industry is heading is that they want accurate representations of drug delivery. That's why we've focussed on that area," said Professor Dale Bailey, physicist and one of the founders of PharmaScint.
The PharmaScint team, which consists of Dale, pharmacist Professor Kim Chan and nuclear medicine specialist Professor Paul Roach, use an innovative technique that combines the SPECT images of the radioactive tracer with a CT scan of the patient, which gives a neat visual of the drug's anatomical position in the body.
"It's a very powerful communicator of information," said Dale. "If you've ever seen any of the SPECT-type images, you need someone to explain to you what you're looking at. But if you fuse it in colour over the black and white CT scan, most people instantly recognise what part of the body they're in. You can say 'there's the tracer, you can see where it's gone' - they know instantly what's going on."
They decided to form PharmaScint because they were constantly being hounded for their expertise in imaging aerosol delivery to the lungs.
"The real reason the company has come about is that we keep getting asked can we do this stuff - so the idea is to offer a service that's for the pharmaceutical industry," said Dale.
The bulk of medical radioisotopes used in nuclear imaging in Australia are manufactured by ANSTO, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. They are created in ANSTO's research reactor and its medical cyclotron.
Nuclear medicine's ability to image a patient's biochemistry makes it a vital tool not only in research and drug development, but also in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. As new, more advanced radioisotopes and imaging technology become available, nuclear imaging is allowing better tailoring of treatment to the individual patient.
"It's going to revolutionise what we call personalised medicine," said Dr Andrew Katsifis, principal research scientist at ANSTO's Radiopharmaceutical Research Institute.
"The pharmaceutical industry is providing us with new generations of treatment modalities," Andrew explained, "and if we're able to fine-tune those to a particular patient and/or a particular cancer, then we're able to offer better health care."
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