UCSF Team Studies Non-Invasive Imaging to Monitor Therapy Response in Patients with Glioblastoma
A team, including researchers from the UC San Francisco Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, investigated a new imaging tool for monitoring response to therapies in patients with glioblastoma (GBM).
The investigators share their conclusions in "Hyperpolarized -[1- 13C]gluconolactone imaging visualizes response to TERT or GABPB1 targeting therapy for glioblastoma" published in Scientific Reports.
The first authors are Noriaki Minami, MD, PhD, and Dong Hyun Hong, PhD, post-doctoral fellows with UCSF Radiology's Sabrina Ronen, PhD, who is also the corresponding author. Additional authors from the department include Celine Taglang, PhD, Georgios Batsios, PhD, Anne Marie Gillespie and Pavithra Viswanath, PhD. Nicholas Stevers, Carter Barger, PhD, and Joseph Costello, PhD, from UCSF's Neurological Surgery Department, were also involved in the study.
The team focused on therapies that target Telomerase Reverse Transcriptase (TERT) or GA-binding protein B1 (GABPB1). They wanted to monitor TERT expression or silencing resulting from such therapies in mutant TERT promoter GBM patients. The investigators tested the potential of 13C magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) of hyperpolarized (HP) - [1-13C]gluconolactone and found it to be effective.
"Combining our MR metabolic imaging with other MRI-based and advanced machine learning methods could further enhance the value of noninvasive MR-based personalized imaging for GBM patients," write Minami et al.
Glioblastoma is the most aggressive and treatment-resistant intracranial tumor and has a median survival of 15 months. The research team aimed to develop a non-invasive imaging approach "to enable the detection of targeted TERT-silencing and response to therapy." The study findings reveal an imaging method to monitor therapy response in patients with glioblastoma and have the potential to support effective clinical care.
"Our study identified 13C-MRS-detectable HP 6PG produced from HP gluconolactone as a metabolic biomarker of TERT and its silencing in human GBM with TERT promoter mutations, adding another translatable biomarker to the armamentarium of imaging tools that can help improve the monitoring of targeted therapies and personalized treatment of GBM patients, and more broadly any cancer patients for whom TERT might be considered a therapeutic target," write Minami et al.
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