by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | September 16, 2015
Courtesy of Massachusetts
General Hospital
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has developed a new imaging agent that may give physicians the information needed to save the lives of patients with ischemic stroke or pulmonary embolism. A study involving the new agent will be included in the October issue of the journal
Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology.
The agent is called 64Cu-FBP8 and it works by detecting blood clots anywhere in the body with PET imaging. It may also be able to tell the difference between recently formed clots and older ones, which can determine the chances of the clot being the source of the stroke or pulmonary embolism, and the composition of the clot, which can reveal if it will respond to clot-dissolving treatments.
The current imaging techniques to determine the presence and location of clots are only designed for a specific area of the body. As a result, physicians have to use multiple imaging modalities including ultrasound, echocardiography, MR and CT angiography.
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Researchers at MGH induced the formation of clots in the carotid arteries and the femoral veins in a group of rats. They conducted whole-body 64Cu-FBP8 PET imaging and CT imaging on each rat, three or seven days after the clot formed.
The researchers who weren’t informed about the precise locations of the clots read the images and accurately detected the locations 97 percent of the time. Additionally, the signal that 64Cu-FBP8 generated declined with the age of the clot and the amount of fibrin it contained.
They concluded that because the older clots are more stable, they are less likely to be the source of a clot that caused a stroke. The younger clots are more likely to benefit from clot-dissolving with those agents because they are fibrin-rich and the drugs target fibrin.
The researchers plan on testing 64Cu-FBP8 in human patients in the near future to investigate how the agent is distributed through the body and how long it remains after injection. That information is needed to designing studies that show its diagnostic effectiveness in patients.
