Professor Phil Blower is leading this team that has been awarded over £6 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
For over a decade, King’s has been assembling an environment and team fit for the task of delivering this multidisciplinary programme to develop fast, efficient chemistry for novel PET imaging agent The Imaging Chemistry and Biology Department within the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences has ten academic molecular imaging chemists and biologists, alongside physicists and clinicians, plus key external experts feeding in additional novel chemistry and image analysis.
The programme entitled – 'Next generation molecular imaging and therapy with radionuclide' or 'MITHRAS'– has 15 co-investigators, including 12 from King’s, two from Imperial College and one from Southampton University. The research team will also comprise post-doctoral assistants and aligned PhD students, whose work will be to design, validate and translate novel radionuclide imaging agents and radiotherapeutics.
The programme will run over 5 years, with clinical translation as the guiding principle it hopes to build on the new tracers that have come out of the department in recent years. These included tracers for imaging prostate and thyroid cancer, hypoxia (lack of oxygen to tissues) and for tracking the journey of therapeutic stem cells in the body.
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