2011-11-28
It all started with a chance e-mail to Switzerland. Deniz Kirik was fishing around for someone with the competence to update Lund’s PET-imaging facilities. The infrastructure in Lund did not have the proper equipment and Swedish patients had been flying in and out of London for PET-imaging trials for decades. What Deniz didn’t know was that the man answering his mail in Geneva would help kick off a string of events leading to a record-fast establishment of a new PET tracer module in Lund, ready-to-use in under twelve months. An idea that had been sitting on the drawing board for many years quickly became a reality. And at a sale price too.
- It turned out that the guy in Geneva who has been integral in helping us develop this knew other colleagues here in Lund from his post-doc time in UCLA. I didn’t know this when I contacted him. It also turned out that he had previously been working very closely with one of the advisors to the Lund Bioimaging Center, so I believe that his close link to Lund is probably what swayed him to help us build the module.
- Of course, we could have bought other machines, but it would have cost us several millions. We instead got this machine in place on a budget lower than 100.000 SEK, says Deniz Kirik, clearly pleased with the Biomagin Center’s latest acquisition.
The expertise offered by the team in Switzerland presented a unique opportunity to custom build add-ons to the existing PET-facilities at Lund’s hospital. The goal was to acquire the technology needed to create advanced tracers for experimental research, a capacity that was non-existent in Lund.
A few years earlier the Swiss scientists had developed a similar synthesis machine to the one that was now being upgraded at Lund’s cyclotron facilities. With the same technology in place in Lund the existing imaging site would be transformed. Previously only standard radiotracers for clinical use could be produced. Now, it would be possible to make advanced tracers allowing scientist to visualize detailed processes inside the brain. The proponents for the synthesis machine knew that such an upgrade would constitute a key edition to the overall biomedical research infrastructure at Lund University.
First test run successful
The security demands for producing tracers are rigorous because of the radioactive components created in the process. The machinery involved is highly specialized and the materials can’t be handled on a normal bench, you have to work in a chamber, a heavily reinforced space called a hot cell. The hot cell is a shielded nuclear radiation containment chamber consisting of thick led walls weighing several tons. This is where the radioactive tracers are generated. At the Lund facility these complex processes will be monitored by radiochemist Thuy Tran, a vital recruit for the future success of the project.
- Thuy has already been working in the background for the last twelve months. She’s been the synchronizing factor here, communicating with the cyclotron unit as well as the collaborators in Geneva to make sure that all this was coordinated. She is also the one who will be making our tracers in the future, pushing the actual buttons, and these people are not easy to find today, says Deniz Kirik.
Thuy was involved a few weeks ago when the first test runs were made. An intense few days preceded the first ever synthesis for research purposes at Lund University. With the time, effort and money put in over the past year the group was anxious to see if the first images would reveal that the new tracer had actually worked. The results came quickly, and they were satisfactory. The images from the rat brains clearly showed the specific uptake in the striatum of the brain, exactly as the researchers had hoped and predicted. The hard work had paid off and the planning of new experiments immediately began.
Ushering in a new era
The successful tests signaled the start of a new chapter for the Lund Bioimaging Center. With the new technology in place Lund has become a more competitive research environment. The easy access to PET-imaging will allow researchers to tackle scientific problems from different angles. Critical imaging data will give further weight to scientific publications, as the added evidence grows stronger. The facilities will, simply put, make it easier for researchers to build a scientific case.
- We are broadening our toolset. This is to be viewed as a technology-enabling investment, which means that any research group will be able to contact the center and use PET imaging for their experiments. This is also relevant for many other brain diseases than just Parkinson’s. Quite simply, it’s helping us to do experiments better than we did before.
One of the first projects to utilize the new technology is a joint Bagadilico effort aiming to develop tracers that bind to dopamine receptors. If successful, the tracers will reveal the efficacy of different methods with the shared goal of re-enabling the brain to make dopamine. The tracers will light up in the PET-image created, demonstrating the level of dopaminergic activity in the brain. For example, if you can show that the binding to the receptors has been normalized, you have most likely successfully corrected dopamine deficiency. If you are then able to correlate these findings with behavioral recovery in animals you have a strong case for a treatment with a clearly beneficial effect. These are important steps that are needed before a treatment can be tested in patients. In that sense, PET-imaging is a bridge between the laboratory and the patient, speeding up the process towards clinical trials.
Deniz Kirik believes that this is just the beginning of an era where bioimaging will continue to grow in importance. He tells me that as imaging becomes more common it will help scientists capitalize not only on successful experiments, but on failures too.
- If you review clinical trials that have tested novel therapeutic strategies for PD, you’ll find that most of these tests have yielded negative results. Some of those trials reveal interesting biological read outs, they generate new questions or new hypotheses, which suddenly open up doors even on the end of a failure. If you end up in a negative trial without imaging data you may find it difficult to explain why the experiment failed. Whereas if you have collected images you can then start formulating questions, new questions that you didn’t think about from the beginning.
In his efforts to develop Lund’s Bioimaging Center, Deniz Kirik has been a tireless worker. Now that the pieces are starting to fall into place it seems that his energy is only picking up. Anxious to put the new facilities to the test he is determined to generate solid scientific results within the first year.
- Nothing should prevent us from being the most advanced site for PET-imaging in Sweden, hopefully in less than five years. What we have done here is to trigger a late awakening. Our goal now is to catch up.
Page Manager: Jens Persson
Last modified: 2011-11-28
