Although most of the studies now occurring in the In Vivo Cellular and Molecular Imaging Centers (ICMICs) are focused on basic animal research, investigators aren't wasting any time in moving the power of in vivo molecular imaging to human patients under grants separate from the ICMIC study.
With technical improvements over the last several years, molecular imaging--positron emission tomography (PET) in particular--now has the capacity to begin to answer important unknowns in gene therapy trials, such as whether the transgene gets to the tumor site and whether it expresses and for how long it expresses.1 By its very nature, PET has the capacity to move seamlessly into clinical use. "One of the nice things about PET is that the probes are used in near-'mass-less' quantities--meaning they don't alter the system at all --so we can and do the same types of studies in patients as in mice, and it's very ...
