- Develop and optimize quantitative preclinical quantitative imaging methods and protocols. These methods will involve novel long-lived phantoms that can cross-calibrate multiple preclinical and clinical PET scanners. This will be tested with partner members of the Co-Clinical Imaging Research Resources Program.
- Implement the optimized methods in our co-clinical trial of ICI treatment of NSCLC with a GEMM lung adenocarcinoma model and a GEMM model lung squamous cell carcinoma. From this we will evaluate how the information gleaned from the pre-clinical and clinical studies can be used to inform future pre-clinical studies in terms of optimized mouse imaging protocols and response criteria.
- Share data and resources on co-clinical trials using quantitative PET imaging using a web-accessible open science approach (open source + open data) by extending the DICOM standard for pre-clinical small animal imaging with DICOM-compliant structures that provide necessary quantitative meta-data.
These methods and resources developed during this project will be distributed to accelerate the development of needed effective cancer therapies by improving the utility of early-phase oncology trials using co-clinical studies with PET imaging. In addition, we will determine, and potentially improve, the utility of PET imaging as a biomarker for early assessment of response in co-clinical immunotherapy studies by using an appropriate mouse model.