Nowadays, there are many tools for cancer diagnosis, from imaging techniques to biopsies. In traditional blood tests, liquid biopsy bursts onto the scene as an explosion of possibilities driven by molecular techniques for the detection and sequencing of proteins or genetic material. But specialists are cautious because they know that in liquid biopsies not everything is detected. At the ENA 2022 session “The role of ctDNA in clinical trials,” Marie Morfouace, a translational researcher at the EORTC, presented “ctDNA in clinical trial practice today,” where she described the balance of the possibilities of the liquid biopsy when confronting it with the results in patients offered by the studies published to date.
Researchers from the University of Saskatchewan have developed a novel theranostic candidate, [67Cu]EB-TATE, as an alternative to [177Lu]DOTATATE, for the imaging of gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (GEP-NET). EB-TATE, which is a derivative of octreotate with evans blue (EB), was radiolabeled with electron linear accelerator-produced 67CuCl2.
Researchers from Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf presented the discovery of novel small molecule-based radiotracers for PD-L1 PET or SPECT imaging.
Rational drug design based on EPI-X4, endogenous antagonist of C-X-C motif chemokine receptor (CXCR4), led to the identification of optimized analogues named JMF-01 to JMF-07, which demonstrated increased antagonistic activity.
The suboptimal metabolic stability of radiolabeled gastrin-releasing peptide receptor (GRPR) antagonists has been a hindering factor of these promising theranostic candidates for prostate cancer. Uppsala University researchers have recently reported the development of [111In]DOTAGA-PEG-2-SAR11-RM-26, after replacement of Gly11 by Sar11 in the peptidic chain.
Researchers have detailed the development and preclinical characterization of a novel heterobivalent radiotracer targeting prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) and the gastrin-releasing peptide receptor (GRPR).
At the recent European Association of Nuclear Medicine meeting in Barcelona, researchers from the British Columbia Cancer Research Institute and the University of British Columbia reported the development and preclinical evaluation of bispecific radiotracers designed to target prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) and fibroblast activation protein (FAP).
In a study comparing the antibody repertoire of individuals with severe myalgic encephalopathy/ chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) to that of healthy controls, the majority of individuals with CFS showed antibody responses to specific microbiome proteins. Such responses were largely absent in healthy controls, implicating immune reactions to the microbiome in the development of ME/CFS.