Assessment of therapy response in malignant tumours with ¹⁸F-fluorothymidine

Excerpt

Cancer is one of the most common causes of death. The incidence of cancer will inevitably rise as the general population ages and better screening/detection methods become available. It is estimated that one in three people will develop cancer in their lifetime, and that one in four will die of the disease [1]. Significant progress has been made during the past couple of decades in defining various genetic and molecular alterations involved in the pathogenesis of cancer. Because of this, an increasing number of new drugs are being developed to target different molecular aspects and tumour biology. There has been statistically significant improvement in survival of patients with common advanced solid tumours. However, the drug evaluation process has not progressed as much as the discoveries in molecular tumour biology. This is mainly because more than 10 years must be spent on rigorous clinical trials to obtain toxicity, efficacy and survival data for each new anticancer drug. It has been estimated that it requires more than $800 million to develop and market a new anticancer drug [1]. Despite the significant advances and improvements in structural and functional imaging over the past two decades, treatment responses are still being assessed on the basis of measurement of tumour size before and after treatment, a criterion published more than 25 years ago. Surrogates which can demonstrate the anti-cancer effect of a drug at an early stage will be very useful for evaluation of the treatment response and will reduce the long duration of clinical trials required for new drug development. …