Methods for cancer imaging

Abstract

Methods are provided for cancer and pre-cancer detection by increased uptake of fluorophore glucose or deoxyglucose conjugates in cancerous and pre-cancerous cells relative to normal cells.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCES TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] This application claims priority to provisional U.S. patent application Ser. No. 60 / 342,313, filed 21 Dec. 2001, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0002] The term “cancer” generally refers to one of a group of more than 100 diseases that are caused by the uncontrolled growth and spread of abnormal cells and can take the form of solid tumors, lymphomas and non-solid cancers such as leukemia Unlike normal cells, which reproduce until maturation is attained and then only-reproduce as necessary to replace wounded cells, cancer cells grow and divide endlessly without differentiating to mature, functional cells, crowding out nearby cells and eventually spreading to other parts of the body. [0003] The most common sites in which cancer develops include the skin, lungs, female breasts, prostate, colon, rectum, bladder, uterus, blood-forming tissues, and lymphatic system. Cancer cells that have...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

This sort of tumor progression makes cancer dangerously fatal.

Although there have been great improvements in diagnosis, general patient care, surgical techniques, and local and systemic adjuvant therapies, most deaths from cancer are still due to metastases that are either resistant to conventional therapies or are undetected by current diagnostic methods.

Many biopsy methods are invasive and require surgical removal of tissue for analysis.

While PET scanning is quite useful to image the entire patient for cancer, it requires expensive and cumbersome equipment for detection and construction of the positron used for the image.

Accordingly, PET scanning cannot be used for the detection of cancer in many clinical settings, such as in the physician's office during the time of physical examination or in the operating room at the time of surgery.

Drawbacks to this procedure reside in the experience of the examiner, and errors in diagnosis can be life threatening.

In instances where cancers are missed and then spread beyond the original site of disease, mortality can increase.

Conversely, some skin lesions are biopsied which are not cancerous, and the patients are thus subjected to unnecessary harm.

In some cases, biopsy samples are taken from the face, leading to cosmetic debility.

These tests provide guidance for surgery, but at the time of surgery, these images cannot be generated in real time to guide the surgeon to the tumor.

However, this procedure is often not conducted, as it requires a highly trained pathologist to be present at the surgery and to rapidly analyze the tissue sample while the patient remains on the operating table.

Unfortunately, despite such efforts, residual tumor will be left inside the patient about 15-25% of the time.

Studies have shown that these patients are at greater risk of dying of the cancer than those that have the tumor completely resected.

Because of this, these patients require further, often debilitating, costly therapy in an attempt to arrest and treat the cancer left in the patient at the time of surgery.

However, even with this enhanced method of screening, smaller tumors and cancer cells can go undetected.

These detection methods are limited in that they cannot be used in the general physician's practice for screening large numbers of patients nor can they be used at the time of surgery to locate the residual tumor.

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