GE Healthcare is teaming up with three companies and one U.S. academic institution to develop a portfolio of PET tracers designed to better predict and monitor patient response to immunotherapies.
Collaborative agreements were signed with Indi Molecular of Culver City, California, U.S., for a CD8 T-cell marker; Affibody Imaging of Solna, Sweden, for a PDL-1 cell expression marker; and AdAlta, of Melbourne, Australia, for a granzyme-B activated T-cell marker.
GE also will continue its work with Vanderbilt University Medical Center as part of their five-year partnership to develop diagnostic tools that use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the safety and efficacy of immunotherapy treatments before offering them to patients.
The ultimate goal is to produce PET tracers to accurately screen immune mechanisms in real-time, give clinicians a more comprehensive understanding of a patient's entire tumor environment and its heterogeneity, enable more successful selection of therapies, and also enable earlier and more accurate monitoring of their efficacy. The portfolio currently contains various of tracers designed to target biomarkers associated with both tumors and the presence and state of T cells, a subpopulation of white blood cells which typically fight cancers.
