Laura Lane

Molecular imaging enthusiasts would undoubtedly like to encounter more residents like Dr. Jinha M. Park. In his last year of residency at the University of California, Los Angeles, Park completed his fellowship at Stanford, where he spent a year studying optical imaging modalities.

Molecular imaging tracers, agents, and probes have been cast in a new tactical assemblage designed to improve investigational drug evaluations.

Four strategies for creating MR imaging probes came to light at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine meeting in May. While differential accumulation of contrast agent may not occur, the agent appears only where it's turned on exclusively in target tissues, said Angelique Louie, Ph.D., an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of California, Davis.

Under the supervision of Dr. Lily Wu, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles created a prostate-specific two-step transcription amplification (TSTA) technique to deliver suicide gene therapy to hormone-refractory prostate cancer (HRPC), an aggressive cancer that is stubbornly resistant to conventional therapy.

National Institutes of Health researchers have successfully broken through the cell membrane, a barrier that has frustrated the efforts of many gene therapy strategies. Their study, published in the May 2005 issue of Radiology, found that high-intensity focused ultrasound significantly increases the number of exogenous genes that permeate the cells of subcutaneous squamous cell carcinomas. Ultrasonic waves were delivered in short pulses to dissipate heat and generate mechanical power that increased a tumor cell's permeability by therapeutic genes.

Molecular medical researchers no longer have to fly blind as they develop ways to navigate therapeutic genes or stem cells toward disease sites. By harnessing the natural behavior of viruses and cells, molecular imaging illuminates the path of therapeutic genes and cells and serves as the guiding light in human clinical trials. The technology is influencing basic research now and is making the transition to human trials that could have sweeping implication for radiological practice in the future.

Controversy over the pain reliever Vioxx has prompted the pharmaceutical industry and medical community to rethink the way drugs make the long journey from petri dish to patient. But it didn't take newspaper headlines to draw attention to the frustrations and difficulties drug developers face. Between 2002 and 2003, the pharmaceutical industry submitted nearly 50% fewer investigational new drug applications than it did just seven years before, while the industry and public institutions together spent two and a half times more money on biomedical research.