Studying Cancer Biology and Therapeutic Targets Using PET Technology

In vivo imaging is at the heart of preclinical research into cancer biology and treatment, with advances in technology delivering tools that are ever more powerful, accurate and easy-to-use. In this webinar, you will hear about one lab’s experience of integrating one such technology – Bruker’s preclinical PET system – into a hospital-based small-animal imaging lab, and how it has assisted their paradigm-shifting research into cancer cell biology.

What to Expect

Professor Gianmario Sambuceti will describe his team’s experience of establishing an experimental small-animal imaging lab on-site at the IRCCS San Martino, one of Europe’s largest hospitals, using Bruker PET technology.

This webinar took place on January 26th, 2017

Key Topics

  • Establishing a lab layout
  • microPET applications in cancer research
  • Tracer kinetics studies
  • Studying the metabolism of cancer cells
  • Metabolic evaluation of non-model organisms

Professor Sambuceti and his team at the Nuclear Medicine Unit, Department of Health Sciences, University of Genoa and IRCCS AOU San Martino-IST, Genoa, Italy identified a previously unknown way of processing glucose in cancer cells through the application of microPET imaging.

The findings shed new light on established models of cell metabolism, and could lead to new options for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

During this webinar, Professor Sambuceti will explain how the team used Bruker PET technology in their research to study how glucose is used by cancer cells. He will describe the team’s findings and outline how the particular advantages of PET imaging helped overcome obstacles to this kind of research in the past. 
Professor Sambuceti will explain as well the benefits and rationale behind establishing a small animal imaging lab integrated with local research institutions and the hospital. He will also describe some of the practical considerations that go into planning a lab layout and workflow, and how his team optimized the Bruker Albira system for their needs.

Who Should Attend?

This webinar is of interest for biomedical researchers, physicists, radio-pharmacists, radiochemists, radiologists, nuclear medicine doctors and technologists in the fields of oncology, cancer treatment, molecular imaging, metabolic processes, and preclinical imaging.

Speaker

Prof. Gianmario Sambuceti

Nuclear Medicine, Dept of Health Sciences, University of Genoa, Italy

Prof. Gianmario Sambuceti’s (University of Genova / CNR (National Research Institution of Italy) team is a globally-recognized group in metabolism and cancer research, with multiple high impact papers. They have been working with Albira 2 since 2011, and were a major factor in improving Albira´s dynamic study performance.  They are, as world-class scientists, very strict and even hard in their expectations. They are always expecting a major contribution of technology to medical research and saving patient lives. Previous major -if less breakthrough- papers on the effects of Metformin (MTF) on treating cancer by reducing cancer cell metabolism of glucose were also successfully performed by them with Albira.