The UW-FHCC Research Resource for Co-Clinical Imaging of Lung Cancer Therapies (Co-CIRP) is a member of the NCI Co-Clinical Imaging Research Resource Program, which promotes development of quantitative imaging resources for therapeutic or prevention co-clinical trials that study both patients and human-in-mouse models. The resources will encourage a consensus on optimizing quantitative imaging methods and develop standard operating procedures for co-clinical imaging applications. We are committed to provide the cancer and imaging communities with free-accessible, comprehensive information resources to guide co-clinical imaging investigations in the context of experimental design, protocol & software development, modeling & information extraction, biological & pathological validations, multiscale data integration, and preclinical-clinical correlations.
Overview
The use of small animal models and clinical trials using medical imaging have led to improved diagnosis and treatment of human disease. The goal of this work is develop methods and resources for co-clinical trials using PET imaging, and to implement them in a co-clinical trial evaluating immunotherapy treatment for lung cancer. The methods and resources developed to improve the utility of early-phase oncology trials using co-clinical studies with PET imaging will be distributed to accelerate the development of needed effective cancer therapies.
Project Goals and Deliverables
The specific goal of our proposal is to develop and optimize methods for quantitative pre-clinical PET imaging for immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapies in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). We will leverage an existing co-clinical trial using our genetically-engineered mouse model (GEMM) of lung adenocarcinoma to develop, test and implement the methods and populate a web-accessible research resource. This web- accessible research resource will in turn leverage recent developments in quantitative cancer imaging informatics using the industry-standard DICOM format. In response to PAR-18-841 there are four components to our proposal: (1) appropriate models, (2) a co-clinical trial including a therapeutic goal, (3) quantitative preclinical and clinical PET imaging, and (4) an innovative quantitative cancer imaging informatics platform.
Our longer term goal is to improve outcomes for NSCLC patients, as lung cancer is still the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. Although ICI therapy has been a tremendous clinical benefit for some NSCLC patients, only ~20% of NSCLC patients respond to anti-PD1/PDL1 therapy. Using PET co-clinical imaging to improve ICI therapies for NSCLC is challenged by a lack of suitable informatics methods to capture and track necessary meta-information, appropriate response criteria for preclinical imaging, which in turn is a consequence in part of the lack of quantitative preclinical PET imaging methods that are linked to quantitative clinical PET imaging methods.
Supported by NIH award U24CA264044 (Houghton, Kinahan)
Project Period 09/15/2021 – 08/31/2026