L’Italian Medicines Agency (AIFA) authorized the nuclear medicine department of Santo Stefano di Pratoof the Ausl Toscana Center for clinical trials of radiopharmaceutical for diagnostic purposes ’68Ga-Fapi-46′ for PET use (nuclear medical imaging technique with positron emission tomography) in cancer patients.
The non-profit interventional study entitled 68Ga-Fapi-46 Pet/Ct serves for the molecular evaluation of fibroblast activation and risk in solid tumors and will be conducted in collaboration with Irccs Romagnoli Institute for the study of tumors ‘Dino Amadori’ of Emilia Romagna.
The study for nuclear medicine at the Prato hospital was largely financed with the contribution of Sandro Pitigliani Foundation, committed for years in the fight against tumors.
This is, for various reasons, a very important achievement by the team directed byDoctor Stelvio Sestini, director of the facility who explains: “68Ga-Fapi-46 is a radiotracer inhibitor of the fibroblast activation protein (Fap) associated with cancer or, in simpler words, it is able to recognize and bind selectively to this glycoprotein which is present in large quantity on the membrane of these cells. This is very important because cancer-associated fibroblasts represent approximately 80% of the fibroblasts present in the tumor microenvironment and have a crucial role in the genesis of most solid tumors such as brain, breast, lung or intestinal tumors. It is therefore a bio-molecular imaging method capable of detecting the tumor selectively and very early.”
The technique of using 68Ga-Fapi-46 is very simple that is, it is based on the administration of the radiopharmaceutical intravenously and the subsequent acquisition (10 min) of images of the distribution of the radiopharmaceutical in the human organism using the Pet tomograph. The presence of fibroblasts and therefore of the tumor is visualized in the bio-molecular images as an accumulation area of the radiopharmaceutical 68Ga-Fapi-46.
