Adoptive cell therapies are showing promise as innovative ways of treating patients with cancer. Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy is currently paving the way for adoptive cell therapies in treatment of hematological malignancies and solid tumors including melanoma, breast cancer and sarcoma.

Developing such a therapeutic presents substantial challenges including:

• The assessment of pharmacodynamics (PD) and pharmacokinetics (PK)
• The identification of the right risk-adapted dosing strategy to avoid strong cytokine-driven adverse effects and neurotoxicity
• The prediction of unwanted toxicity due to certain tumor biomarkers also being expressed in normal tissues (on-target/off–tumor toxicity)
• The development of better patient selection criteria

The imaging team at DICE can assist in the process of theragnostic development (radiation dosimetry, phantom harmonization), development and selection of novel metabolic and molecular tumor microenvironment-specific radiotracers.

Due to the complexity of metabolic and molecular imaging in the context of novel CAR-T or other genetically engineered therapies, we are in close collaboration with a medical physicist highly skilled in the fields of nanotechnology, radiation therapy, and molecular imaging.