From the June 2019 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
I believe this is the future; using radiotracers to label these targeted “personalized” therapies to enable physicians to see if the drug localizes in the disease site. Wouldn’t you like to be able to preselect the patients who will respond to the therapy, rather than give it to everyone, wait, and see who gets better, and who doesn’t?
I also believe that some of these targeted therapies will be even more powerful with the addition of a radiotherapeutic radionuclide attached. There are a few of these which have just recently been approved for use in the U.S. At least one of these products is labeled with I131.
Interesting, how sometimes things come full-circle over time.
With the increasing cost of care for patients with rare and advanced disease, we cannot continue to accept the paradigm in which we accept that large percentages of patients will fail a therapy, when there is the opportunity to predict the outcome with a high level of accuracy using companion diagnostic versions of these drugs.
About the author: Peter Webner RT(N),CNMT is the CEO of Zionexa and vice chair of MITA’s PET group.
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