Nuclear theranostics research
Theranostics, PET Imaging, Radionuclidetherapy
Research aim
With nuclear theranostics we aim to develop radiopharmaceuticals to improve the disease diagnosis and therapy, including clinical translation for direct impact. Disease areas of interest are (childhood) cancer, neurology and infectious diseases.
About us
Nuclear theranostics utilizes radiopharmaceuticals for both diagnosis and therapy by targeting specific malignancy related biomarkers. This is achieved through the targeted delivery of radionuclides using labeled mAbs, mAb-fragments, peptides or small-molecules. Within oncology this approach has shown value for personalized diagnosis combined with systemic targeted radionuclide treatments. Key examples from clinical practise are [68Ga/177Lu]DOTATATE or [68Ga/177Lu]PSMA for neuroendocrine tumors or prostate cancer. Exploration and development of nuclear theranostics for other adult and childhood cancers remains limited. Beyond oncology, for e.g. infectious diseases, the successes of theranostics are even more rare.
Therefore, our research program aims to develop nuclear theranostics to improve the non-invasive diagnosis and therapy for oncology and beyond. For this we use a platform based approach, starting from the clinical needs and identifying specific biomarkers to fuel preclinical theranostics development aiming at clinical translation.
Preclinical developments are on molecular lead finding and optimization, followed by radiolabeling, and affinity and efficacy testing. For clinical research we pursue two strategies. This is implementation of existing (published) theranostics in phase II/II trials. Next, we translate newly developed theranostics into clinical research. As research group we focus both on imaging and therapeutic trials.