From the June 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

We’ve decided to partner with the Optical Society of America. Much of optical imaging is used in a preclinical situation with animal imaging but there are a number of projects going on to see how this may be best applied in human populations in the clinic. And now we’ll work together to figure out how best to make that transition from the lab to the clinic.

We’ve also been trying to support new agents —one of them approved about a year ago by the FDA was Amyvid. We’ve done an excellent partnership with the Alzheimer’s Association and worked with them to develop appropriate use criteria on when this agent should be used and, maybe even more importantly, when this agent would not be effective.

Much of what we talk about in nuclear medicine is diagnostic imaging and PET scanning, but we’re also involved in therapy. New probes are being developed that can treat different kinds of disease because they’re targeted to a particular cancer. One that we think will be approved within the next year is an alpha-emitting therapeutic agent being developed by Bayer — this could be pretty exciting because it appears to be effective in treating men with prostate cancer that has spread to the bones. We expect it will be approved by the FDA maybe even by this summer.
DMBN: What are the challenges your members face right now?
FF: There are parts of the new health care reform we think we understand, but we’re not quite sure yet how it’s going to impact us. All we know is it’s going to have a significant impact. On one hand, although imaging can be expensive compared to therapy, it’s probably money well-spent. On our side, we need to do a better job of clinical comparative effectiveness research and clinical research to make compelling arguments for who will order our studies and show them how this new technology can be of value to them.

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