There is a current shortage in Europe of scientists who can use special imaging tools such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) that could speed up and reduce the cost of development of life-saving drugs. This represents a significant problem as PET imaging plays a key role in cancer, heart conditions and neurological diseases and is used by all the major pharmaceutical companies to identify effective drugs at a much earlier stage of drug development. Currently, only 10 in 10,000 drug candidates that enter pre-clinical testing progress to human testing, and only 1 out of those 10 molecules actually make it to the market. The failure of many of these molecules in Phase III, as opposed to Phase I and II trials, means that a lot of resources are wasted getting to Phase III, only then to fail.
PET is a non-invasive and highly sensitive imaging technology developed to visualise and quantify biochemical and physiological processes in vivo. PET imaging can be used to address key questions such as what and where is the disease? Is the disease accurately targeted by the therapy? Is the treatment effective? The ability to answer these questions using PET imaging places scientists in a much more informed position to progress from pre-clinical testing to human testing, i.e. Phase III in drug development.
The four-year research programme PET3D (PET imaging in Drug Design and Development) has trained 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) to become experts in PET, equipping them with the skills necessary to be able to apply PET imaging in an innovative way as a key technology for boosting cost effective drug design and development. We have brought together leading expertise from 6 European academic PET centres and 2 industrial organisations. Through regular network meetings and training schools each ESR has been provided with a holistic and exceptionally fertile research and training environment. The entrepreneurial experience of the ESRs has been also developed through secondments with our industrial beneficiaries and meetings with private-sector experts. The PET3D consortium successfully stimulated cross-fertilisation between the 15 different research projects, which shared the same overall challenges in PET imaging technology. Thus, while the research work in PET3D has been following 15 different research streams, together they formed a single body of research. This research endeavour has significantly contributed to the validation of PET imaging as a paradigm-changing tool in drug design and development. The research output of the PET3D project consisted of a vast and diverse set of deliverables, from the development of novel PET tracers as candidate diagnostics in oncology, cardiovascular and CNS disorders, to the establishment of novel nuclear imaging protocols for drug development, using a variety of molecular formats (small molecules, nanoparticles, proteins and antibodies).
