Imaging of ex vivo specimen: This week I was lucky enough to track the trajectory of patient involved in my clinical study from admittance to surgery and further analysis. The patient in question was selected for the study due to his high grade gleason score and change in PSA expression levels over six months. The patient was injected with Indium-111 labeled J591, an antibody specific to the prostate specific membrane antigen (PSMA). In principal, the J591 would localize to large-volume, high-grade lesions, at worst allowing for localization of the disease within the organ and at best revealing metastases throughout the body after the patient was imaged using SPECT. An interesting addition to this protocol was ex vivo imaging of the prostate specimen after it was removed. Interestingly, a clinical SPECT camera was used as the dept. doesn't have access to a µSPECT. As a result, the imaging results were of very low resolution. In an attempt to increase the signal to noise ratio, we tried to move the specimen closer to the scanner. Due to technical difficulties, I had to improvise a way to hold the prostate in place between the scanners which were waaaaay out of their normal alignment. The result: prostate on a stick. A better explanation and visual representation of this" "highly innovative" method will be on my poster in about a week.
Meeting with “Collaborating Company”: I'll have to give a very spotty description of this meeting due to IP issues. Basically, I was witness to the interactions between industry, medicine, and academia. For instance, in some cases, a much better imaging agent from a scientific and medical point of view (say carbon 11 radiolabelled peptides) gets looked over by the company due to market conditions. SPECT, though lower resolution than PET is much more widely used and the radionuclides required for it are much easier to obtain.
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