USC team develops compact platform for faster radiotracer production

Researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of USC are developing a compact, “plug-and-play” platform designed to accelerate the production of radiotracers used in positron emission tomography, or PET, scans. The project is supported by a four-year, $2.6 million grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, part of the National Institutes of Health. Its aim is to make PET radiotracer production faster, simpler and less dependent on specialized large-scale equipment and facilities.

The grant supports ongoing development and testing; the announcement does not present the platform as a completed clinical technology or report outcomes in patients. PET radiotracers are compounds that combine a tiny amount of radioactive material with a biological molecule designed to seek a specific target in the body, such as a protein found on cancer cells. Once injected, the radioactive signal is detected by a PET scanner, which creates an image showing where the tracer has accumulated.

Unlike imaging methods that primarily show anatomical structures, PET can reveal biological activity inside the body, including the presence and location of particular molecules or processes and changes over time. The project addresses a bottleneck in translational imaging: scientists can identify promising biological markers more quickly than they can convert them into usable PET tracers. Incorporating radioactive material into a candidate molecule is time-consuming and technically demanding, requiring specialized equipment and facilities.

The USC team’s platform is intended to reduce that production burden by pairing a universal radioactive building block with different biological molecules. In principle, the same compact setup could generate several tracer candidates rather than requiring a separate production configuration for every compound. The announced work focuses on developing that approach, not on an already validated system for routine clinical use.

At the center of the platform are two radiochemistry approaches: click chemistry, which allows molecules to be joined quickly, and droplet radiochemistry, which carries out chemical reactions in extremely small droplets and therefore uses tiny amounts of material. Kai Chen, PhD, a professor of research radiology, radiation oncology, and pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences at USC, is leading the project with collaborators at UCLA. The device they are building uses a tiny chip to combine the universal radioactive building block with selected biological molecules.

Chen said concentrating the process on the chip could enable radiotracers to be produced rapidly and efficiently, with less reliance on traditional large-scale equipment and dedicated facilities. Preliminary research suggests that the approach can generate radiotracers for multiple cancer biomarkers on a very small scale. One candidate is designed to target fibroblast activation protein, which is found at high levels in many tumors.

The team is also testing tracers intended specifically to detect liver and prostate cancer. Chen said these findings show that click chemistry can rapidly generate tracers for multiple cancer biomarkers and that the compounds can be produced at miniature scale. The results provide early evidence for the platform’s underlying chemistry, but the announcement does not report human diagnostic performance, improved clinical outcomes or a final device ready for routine use.

The next one to two years of the funded project are expected to focus on optimizing the compact device and testing a broader range of radiotracers. The researchers plan to compare some candidates with established tracers to determine how well they perform. After that testing, the team intends to build and refine the final device, conduct quality control and complete preclinical testing before working toward clinical applications.

These are planned stages of the research program. The grant announcement therefore supports a development roadmap involving optimization, comparative evaluation, quality control and preclinical assessment rather than a completed demonstration of clinical benefit. If the platform succeeds, automating and simplifying radiotracer production could lower costs and reduce the resources required to create new tracers.

The USC team says this could make it possible to produce a wider range of customized tracers and potentially expand access to PET imaging. More specialized agents could allow researchers and medical providers to examine molecular features of tumors and track changes over time. Such information could help assess treatment response earlier and more precisely, potentially indicating sooner whether a therapy is working or whether a different approach is needed.

Those benefits are possibilities that depend on successful development and validation of particular tracers, not outcomes already established by the grant-funded project. The modular platform may also be adapted beyond cancer. The researchers are considering uses for radiotracers targeting conditions including neurological diseases, reflecting the broader objective of expanding PET imaging into additional areas of medicine.

Because the construction combines a reusable radioactive building block with biological molecules designed for different targets, the system could support more than one type of tracer. The supplied announcement does not report completed neurological studies or patient cohorts, so that application remains prospective. It also does not establish how broadly the platform could be deployed or what effect it will ultimately have on PET availability.

The program brings together imaging science, chemistry and engineering, with support from NIH grant R01EB040161. Joshua Hirsch, MD, chair of USC’s Department of Radiology and the Stewart Dale Fordham, MD, Chair in Radiology, said the award recognizes the team’s innovative work and its potential to make advanced molecular imaging more accessible, accelerate radiotracer development and ultimately provide better tools for diagnosis and personalized treatment. Those statements describe the anticipated impact of the project.

The demonstrated work to date consists of a miniaturized radiochemistry concept supported by preliminary radiotracer-generation results, while optimization, broader tracer testing, preclinical evaluation and subsequent clinical development remain ahead.

Subject of Research: A compact radiochemistry platform for producing PET radiotracers targeting cancer biomarkers.

Article Title: USC researchers launch effort to expand PET imaging for cancer and other diseases

Article References: USC researchers launch effort to expand PET imaging for cancer and other diseases. Original publication (Bibliographic details unavailable.)

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Keywords: PET imaging, radiotracers, radiochemistry, cancer imaging, click chemistry, droplet radiochemistry, molecular imaging, USC, NIH funding, diagnostic imaging, researchers, launch