Whole-body PET scan with new imaging agent can locate hidden blood clots
A novel radiopharmaceutical probe developed at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has the potential of providing physicians with information that could save the lives of patients with ischemic stroke or pulmonary embolism – conditions caused when important blood vessels are blocked by a clot that has traveled from another part of the body. In a report that appears in the October issue of the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology, the MGH team describes using this new probe to conduct full-body scans in an animal model. Preliminary results also were reported at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society.
“We found that, with a single intravenous injection of our clot-finding probe 64Cu-FBP8, we were able to detect blood clots anywhere in the body using a positron emission tomography (PET) scan,” says lead author Francesco Blasi, PharmD, PhD, formerly a research fellow at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH and now at the University of Torino in Italy. Read more.