Abstract
| Targeted alpha therapy (TAT) is a rapidly growing cancer treatment modality, whereby alpha-emitting radiopharmaceuticals are combined with a targeting molecule to selectively seek tumours whilst minimising the damage to healthy cells. TAT is showing promising efficacy and increased survival in clinical trials for a variety of cancers; however, several unmet and unique measurement challenges remain a barrier to enable the safe and optimised implementation of emerging TATs. The goal of AlphaMET is to provide the underpinning metrology to support development of TAT through improved methods to quantify activity and absorbed doses for alpha-emitting radiopharmaceuticals. The provision of validated radioactivity standards with recommendations for improving measurements will benefit end-users that rely on such calibration services, including manufacturers of ionising radiation measurement instruments (radionuclide calibrators, gamma counters, imaging scanners), radionuclide production facilities, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals delivering TAT. More specifically, healthcare professionals will be able to administer treatments with traceable activities, and with accuracies within the limits recommended by the IAEA while providing them with methods to standardise and harmonise imaging and dosimetry methods with robust uncertainty budgets will improve reproducibility in multi-centre studies and enable comparison of results, providing greater statistical power to study correlations between absorbed dose and response/outcome measures which are still lacking for TAT. This will provide the basis for evidence-based treatments, facilitating regulatory compliance and marketing authorisation of upcoming alpha radiopharmaceuticals for the pharmaceutical industry, and potentially reducing the development costs by introducing metrology early before routine implementation of TAT. |