GE Healthcare Partners with Companies and Academia to Expand PET Tracer Portfolio

In a Sep. 24, 2019 press release, GE Healthcare announced that it is partnering with several companies and academic institutions with the aim of developing a portfolio of targeted oncology positron emission tomography (PET) tracers.

It is hoped that the PET tracers will be able to better predict and monitor responses to immunotherapies through accurate screening of immune mechanisms in real-time. The portfolio will contain tracers for biomarkers that are associated with tumors as well as the presence and state of T cells. 

Three company deals have already been signed, one with Indi Molecular for a CD8 T-cell marker, another with Affibody Imaging for a programmed death-ligand-1 (PDL-1) cell expression marker, and the third with AdAlta for a Granzyme-B activated T-cell marker. After proof-of-concept for these tracers has been achieved, they will be used in a clinical setting to improve the success rate and efficiency of immunotherapy clinical trials. Ultimately, this should enable accelerated time-to-market for immunotherapies.

“We know immunotherapies can transform patients’ lives when they are effective, however, low patient response rates, the potential of serious adverse effects and high costs all mean we need to significantly improve how we more accurately predict the efficacy of an immunotherapy,” said Sanka Thiru, global product leader, Molecular Imaging Oncology at GE Healthcare’s Pharmaceutical Diagnostics business, in the press release. “If we can do this accurately and earlier in the patient pathway, we can either avoid a particular course of treatment altogether or shift sooner to an alternative more appropriate therapy.”

Further to the company partnerships, GE Healthcare is working with Vanderbilt University Medical Center, under a five-year partnership deal, to investigate the role of PET in immunotherapies. Through this partnership, the organizations will be looking to develop artificial intelligence powered apps and PET tracers that will be used to aid physicians in the identification of the most appropriate treatment for patients on an individual basis.

Source: GE Healthcare