Using PET/MRI to improve current pre-clinical biomarkers in cancer

Treatments that involve activating a patients own immune system, immunotherapies, are becoming important cancer therapies. Unfortunately, doctors dont always know the best way to combine these therapies to best treat patients and the current tools they have to evaluate treatment success dont work well for immunotherapies. Molecular imaging, particularly magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or positron emission tomography (PET) can help researchers learn more about how these therapies work and how best to combine them. Cubresa has developed advanced technology that allows researchers to simultaneously use PET and MRI for preclinical research.We will therefore be studying how this technology can be used to improve immune cell tracking with MRI and investigate current and new tools for evaluating immunotherapies that can be applied to the clinic. Together with Cubresa, we plan to develop PET/MRI applications that improve and accelerate the translation of immunotherapies.

Faculty Supervisor:

Kimberly Brewer

Student:

Marie-Laurence Tremblay

Partner:

Cubresa Inc.

Discipline:

Biology

Sector:

Medical devices

University:

Program: