Han Discusses the Promise of Ga 68 PSMA-11 and BgRT

Chunhui Han, PhD, medical physicist in the Department of Radiation Oncology at City of Hope National Medical Center, discusses what biology-guided radiotherapy (BgRT) is and how it differs from traditional radiotherapy techniques.

Han then discusses Ga 68 (Ga 68) PSMA-11 and how it functions. Central to this innovation is Ga 68 is a radiotracer that was approved by the FDA in 2020. It works for imaging metastatic prostate cancer and targets the prostate-specific membrane antigen, which is overexpressed in certain prostate cancers. This then allows for the detection of metastatic cancer cells throughout the body using PET scans.

Transcription:

0:09 | BgRT is an emerging modality in radiation oncology. In essence, BgRT uses signals from radiotracers to accurately deliver radiation to the intended target. In a BgRT workflow, the patient is injected with certain radiotracers that will preferentially bind with tumor sites throughout the body. Those radiotracers will light up under special cameras, for example, under positron emission tomography scanners. Those signals will tell the machine the location of the tumor, and this will help the radiotherapy machine to deliver radiation where it is intended.

1:13 |[Ga 68 PSMA-11] is a radiotracer that was approved by the FDA in 2020 to image metastatic sites for [patients with] prostate cancer. It is the first PSMA imaging agent approved for PET scan or PET imaging.

1:49 | PSMA is a molecule, a protein, that can be found in prostate cells, but there is an overexpression of the PSMA for certain prostate cancer types. When they metastasize, you will find prostate cancer cells in other parts of the body, and when we use the PSMA-11 agent, those metastatic sites will also light up under PET scans. So that means you can use Ga68 PSMA-11 as a radiotracer to locate metastatic sites for [patients with] prostate cancer, and that can also be used for BgRT treatments.