But Dr. Thakur posits that the odds are better with NVB-64. In one of his recent studies, Dr. Thakur and his colleagues looked at how the two PET agents detected eight malignant and two benign breast tumors in mice. While NVB-64 PET uncovered all eight malignant growths, FDG picked up just four. And only FDG, not NVB-64, turned up the two benign growths. Human trials using the NVB-64 biomarker are now underway.

Dr. Michael Graham, president of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, believes the research looks promising.

"This seems to be an empiric finding," he says. "[VPAC1] has turned out to be a receptor that is upregulated in a number of malignancies, not just in the breast, but in others including the prostate."

The reason, he argues, is that FDG's glucose use tracking isn't as specific as NVB-64's approach.

"Tumors use glucose rather inefficiently. [FDG] has turned out to be extraordinarily useful in identifying sites of tumors, but it's not specific for tumors," says Dr. Graham. "This [VPAC1] receptor is not 100 percent unique to cancer cells, but it's likely that this is going to be fairly sensitive and specific, but we won't know until more clinical trials determine how useful it's going to be."

Nonetheless, Dr. Graham says this method will likely not replace biopsy. Rather, it will help in difficult cases. He believes more studies should determine its efficacy as an alternative to biopsy and which patient populations would most benefit from these imaging studies.

"The place for an agent like this would be in sorting out the indeterminate mammograms," says Dr. Graham. "If a mammo were clearly positive or clearly negative you would go straight toward getting a biopsy."

Kathy F. Mahdoubi contributed to this report.


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