Developing metal-based radiopharmaceuticals for imaging & therapy: Brett Paterson & Cormac Kelderman

Personalised medicine will be greatly enhanced with the introduction of new radiopharmaceuticals for the diagnosis and treatment of various cancers, as well as cardiovascular disease and brain disorders.

The unprecedented interest in developing theranostic radiopharmaceuticals is mainly due to the recent clinical successes of radiometal-based products including:
• 177LuDOTA-TATE (trade name Lutathera, FDA approved in 2018), a peptide-based tracer that is used for treating metastatic neuroendocrine tumours
• Ga 68 PSMA-11 (FDA approved in 2020), a positron emission tomography agent for imaging prostate-specific membrane antigen positive lesions in men with prostate cancer.

In this webinar, Dr Brett Paterson and PhD candidate Mr Cormac Kelderman present their research on developing the chemistry and radiochemistry to produce new radiometal-based imaging and therapy agents. They discuss the synthesis of new molecules, the optimisation of the radiochemistry, and results from preclinical evaluations.

Dr Brett Paterson is a National Imaging Facility Fellow at Monash Biomedical Imaging and academic group leader in the School of Chemistry, Monash University. His research focuses on the development of radiochemistry and new radiopharmaceuticals.

Cormac Kelderman is a PhD candidate under the supervision of Dr Brett Paterson in the School of Chemistry, Monash University. His research focuses on developing new bis(thiosemicarbazone) chelators for technetium-99m SPECT imaging.