UK launches national total body PET platform for drug discovery
A partnership between the Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC), the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Innovate UK will deliver scientific breakthroughs with the launch of a national total body PET imaging platform to drive drug discovery.
The National PET Imaging Platform (NPIP) will deploy total body PET in Scotland and London, bringing together transformational research from two state-of-the-art scanners supplied by Siemens Healthineers. The aim is to transform medical research and industrialise cutting-edge technology.
NPIP director of operations and engagement and MDC head of translational imaging Dr Juliana Maynard said: “The value of NPIP is huge for the UK life sciences sector, providing researchers with access to superior clinical data, not just from their own trials but from every research programme that joins the platform.
“It means that, collectively, we can power forward drug discovery with renewed confidence and drive world-leading capabilities in detection, diagnosis and treatment.”
With higher sensitivity than existing technology, NPIP’s total body PET scanners are expected to provide new insights into anatomy, improving detection, diagnosis and treatment of complex, multi-organ diseases. Total body PET scans expose patients to lower doses of radiation meaning more patients, including children, can participate in clinical trials to improve understanding of diseases. The speed of total body PET scanners means that NPIP will be able to facilitate more patient scans, enhancing the scale and impact of clinical research projects.
NPIP’s network of infra-structure and intelligence is expected to provide a complete picture of patients and how they respond to novel drugs and treatments. It will connect insights from many research programmes and trials, helping build a rich bank of data that the PET community can access.
The Siemens Healthineers Biograph Vision Quadra PETCT systems capture images in near real-time. Managed by the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, King’s College London and Imperial College London, they are expected to be operational by April 2024. The UK Government, through the UK Research and Innovation Infrastructure Fund, has invested £32 million into the technology.
Professor of cancer pharmacology and molecular imaging Eric Aboagye at Imperial College London said: “With 40 times the sensitivity of conventional PET scans, whole body PET will enable us to study what we couldn’t before, gaining new insights into paediatric disease, cancer screening, investigations into the brain-gut axis, whole body vascular monitoring, cancer evolution and cell tracking.”
Co-director of the NPIP Scotland Centre Dr David Lewis, Beatson Institute for Cancer Research senior lecturer, said: “Total body PET scanners are a quantum leap forward in the technology of body scanning, and we are proud that a partnership between the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow will jointly manage one of the first of these cutting-edge scanners in the UK.”
Siemens Healthineers GB&I business manager for molecular imaging Lawrence Foulsham added: “The NPIP launch is a testament to our commitment to innovation and collaboration in the field of medical imaging. We at Siemens Healthineers are incredibly proud to support this initiative with two Biograph Vision Quadra PETCT scanners which are set to support NPIP in unlocking a range of clinical and research opportunities across the country.”
Lead picture: Demo of a total body PET scan. Credit: Inselspital Bern Switzerland.
Published on the front page of the November 2023 issue of RAD Magazine.
