Novel PET Tracer Identifies Most Bacterial Infections
Stanford
University medical scientists have developed a novel imaging agent that could
be used to identify most bacterial infections. The study is the featured basic
science article in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine’s October issue.
Bacteria
are good at mutating to become resistant to antibiotics. As one way to combat
the problem of antimicrobial resistance, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) has called for the development of novel diagnostics to detect
and help manage the treatment of infectious diseases.
“We
really lack tools in the clinic to be able to visualize bacterial infections,”
explains Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, MD, PhD, chair of the Radiology Department and
director of Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics at Stanford University
in California. “What we need is something that bacteria eat that your cells,
so-called mammalian cells, do not. As it turns out, there is such an agent, and
that agent is maltose, which is taken up only by bacteria because they have a
transporter, called a maltodextrine transporter, on their cell wall that is
able to take up maltose and small derivatives of maltose.”
The
traditional way of diagnosing bacterial infection involves biopsy of the
infected tissue and/or blood and culture tests. Gambhir and colleagues
developed a new positron emission tomography (PET) tracer, 6″-18F-fluoromaltotriose, that offers a non-invasive means of detection.
The agent is a derivative of maltose and is labeled with radioactive
fluorine-18 (18F). For this study, the tracer was evaluated in several
clinically relevant bacterial strains in cultures and in mouse models using a micro-PET/CT scanner. Its use to help
monitor antibiotic therapies was also evaluated in rats.
The
results show that 6″-18F-fluoromaltotriose was taken up in both
gram-positive and gram-negative bacterial strains, and it was able to detect
Pseudomonas aeruginosa in a clinically relevant mouse model of wound infection.
Gambhir
points out, “This is the first time this particular maltotriose, labeled with fluorine-18, has been synthesized and
used in animal models. It’s able to pick up bacteria that may be present
anywhere throughout your body, and it does not lead to an imaging signal from a
site of infection that does not involve bacteria.”
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Source: SNMMI