Jamal Zweit
Virginia Commonwealth University, USA
Title: Molecular imaging in the era of precision medicine
Biography
Biography: Jamal Zweit
Abstract
Precision medicine is an advanced procedure for disease treatment, prevention, diagnosis and, formulated around each individual’s variability in genes, environment and life style, including nutrition. Precision medicine has made advances in diseases such as cancer, but the ultimate goal is to apply the approach to other diseases. With genomics, proteomics and molecular diagnostics, molecular imaging is well positioned to be a major driver of the precision medicine initiative. As a non-invasive tool, multi-modality molecular imaging excels at revealing quantitative information on the cellular and molecular pathways underpinning diseases on an individualized patient basis. Advancements in molecular imaging also provide new and specific ways to detect disease at early and potentially curable stages of disease. Molecular imaging can also identify which patients are likely to respond to certain therapies, from those less likely to respond. In this paradigm, molecular imaging has a huge role to play in accelerating and advancing the field of precision medicine towards more cost-effective healthcare. Our multi-modality molecular imaging research addresses targeted imaging of both the tumor and the tumor microenvironment (TME) and its associated stroma. In this context, we are studying mechanisms of therapeutic intervention within a heterogeneous tumor and TME. A theranostic approach to cancer therapy, where live monitoring of treatment, is visualized by molecular PET imaging of anticancer drugs. Such imaging data is used to guide location-dependent proteomic analysis within a heterogeneous tumor volume. This combined approach reveals information on individual drug resistance driven by alterations in the proteome of cancerous legions. The concept of imaging both tumors and the associated immune cell environment will also be highlighted.