GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — A West Michigan man with pancreatic cancer was the first person in the world to test a new imaging agent, BAMF Health says.
Pancreatic cancer is highly deadly, in part because doctors often don’t discover it until it has spread, according to a Wednesday release from BAMF Health.
“There is certainly an unmet need in the field of pancreatic cancer,” said Dr. Harshad Kulkarni, BAMF Health chief medical advisor.
BAMF Health was chosen as one of three locations for a clinical trial that aims to find a better way to detect the disease, according to the release.
“We are testing a particular drug. It is labeled with a radioactive isotope so that we can image the patient,” Kulkarni, the trial’s principal investigator, explained. “This is an imaging trial. We are doing the diagnosis and localizing where this disease is present in that particular patient.”
BAMF Health says it was chosen for the trial because it has “the most advanced total-body PET/CT scanner in the world.” It was the first of the three locations to launch the trial.
In the case of the West Michigan man with pancreatic cancer, doctors already knew he had liver metastasis, but researchers wanted to know if the imaging agent would target that tumor. And Kulkarni said it did: The scan showed an accumulation of the drug in the liver.
“The question posed to us was, does this particular radiopharmaceutical, does this particular antibody tagged to a radioisotope localize in that particular tumor?” Kulkarni said. “And you’ve got the answer there: It does.”
He said the scanning helps identify whether the drug is present in the tumor and how long it stays. It also looks at how much radioactivity is absorbed by the tumor in comparison to normal tissue.
In the future, the results of the trial could also be used to develop a therapy to treat pancreatic cancer, which BAMF Health says does not exist.
“With results like this, there is certainly a hope to have a targeted treatment,” Kulkarni said.
Scot VanVleet, the West Michigan man who participated in the trial, said it was “an exciting feeling.”
“I think really even the technology that we have today probably wouldn’t be available if people like myself didn’t sign up for these trials,” VanVleet said.
