The Radiopharmaceutical Therapy and Dosimetry Laboratory at Johns Hopkins Medicine, led by George Sgouros, Ph.D., has received a $15 million grant, to be distributed over the next five years, from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health. They will use these funds to investigate a type of radiation therapy for hard-to-treat cancers.
The award will fund several research projects, all of which will explore a promising cancer treatment known as alpha-particle radiopharmaceutical therapy, or alpha-emitting RPT. This therapy has proven successful in treating widespread, treatment-resistant cancers by directly delivering radiation to cancer cells.
Administered into the bloodstream, alpha emission RPT therapy delivers extremely powerful radiation directly to cancer cells. Radioactive atoms that emit alpha particles (helium nuclei) attach to special molecules that target or stick to scattered cancer cells in the body. Alpha particles delivered to cancer cells cause massive DNA damage that kills the cancer. The alpha-emitting RPT also limits the amount of damage to normal tissues surrounding the cancer, which may prevent some of the debilitating side effects that cancer patients can experience with radiation and chemotherapy.
Sgouros, who has researched this treatment throughout his career, has previously demonstrated that this treatment is highly effective in targeting a variety of metastatic cancers that do not respond to traditional radiation and chemotherapy.
Over the past decade, several agents using this approach to delivering radiation therapy targeting treatment-resistant cancer have been approved by the FDA, and Sgouros explains that there is a growing need to improve the delivery of these treatments and explore additional specific radiation therapies.
The study of these types of radiation treatments is a very active field that is also very specialized. It is a unique area of study because a multidisciplinary team is required to fully optimize such therapies, everything from physics, radiochemistry, biology and pharmacokinetics influence this therapeutic approach.”
George Sgouros, director of the department of radiological physics and professor of radiology and radiological science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Now, with the $15 million award, Sgouros and a wide range of researchers at the lab will work to improve the alpha emission RPT and optimize its application. This includes developing approaches to imaging and understanding how radiation is deposited in tissues so that treatment can be tailored to individual patients. Sgouros and his assembled team will focus specifically on the mathematical and physical components of RPT with alpha emission to address these issues.
“We received this grant because we are the group that can solve these problems,” says Sgouros. “This award is a testament to the collective expertise we have here at Hopkins, and what we have proposed to do with this grant can only be done with the team of researchers we have assembled here.”
