GE Healthcare announced this week that it is partnering with several companies to develop a line of PET tracers in the hopes of better predicting patients’ responses to immunotherapies.
As few as 20% of tumor sufferers respond to such treatment, the company stated, and GE Healthcare anticipates that using PET tracers to screen patients in real time could give doctors a better understanding of each condition and allow for earlier selection of the right treatments.
“We know immunotherapies can transform patients’ lives when they are effective, however, low patient response rates, the potential of serious adverse effects and high costs all mean we need to significantly improve how we more accurately predict the efficacy of an immunotherapy,” Sanka Thiru, global product leader in molecular imaging oncology at GE Healthcare’s pharmaceutical diagnostics business, said in a prepared statement.
GE Healthcare is partnering with California-based Indi Molecular to develop a CD8 T-cell marker, Sweden-based Affibody Imaging for a PDL-1 cell expression marker and Australia’s AdAlta to develop a Granzyme-B activated T-Cell marker.
The company announced earlier this year that it was also teaming with Vanderbilt University Medical Center to develop PET tracers and applications powered by AI. GE Healthcare hopes such tools could eventually help physicians identify the best tumor treatments for each individual patient.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.