Ballard Awarded SNMMI Mars Shot Prize to Study Crohn’s Disease Fibrosis

David H. Ballard, MD, assistant professor of radiology for WashU Medicine Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology (MIR), received the Drs. Jane & Abass Alavi Mars Shot Research Award from the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI). The Mars Shot Fund supports translational nuclear medicine imaging, radiopharmaceutical therapy and data science research, while the $100,000 Alavi prize is dedicated to advancing imaging research on infection and inflammation.

Crohn’s disease is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that creates painful ulcers and irritation in the digestive tract. Nearly half of all patients experience abnormal constrictions called symptomatic strictures caused by either inflammation or fibrosis; however, current therapies only treat the former and not the latter. The study, “Novel PET/MR imaging of metabolic activity, proinflammatory macrophage-mediated inflammation, and association with fibrosis in Crohn’s disease,” aims to establish a foundation for biologically informed, noninvasive decision-making in Crohn’s disease.

“Therapeutic success for Crohn’s disease depends on identifying whether inflammation is present and responsive to medical therapy, yet current imaging methods lack the biological specificity needed to guide such decisions,”  said Ballard in a news release. “As a result, patients often experience ineffective treatment escalation or delayed decision-making to proceed to an endoscopic or surgical stricture therapy.”

Ballard, an abdominal radiologist, and his colleagues, Yongjian Liu, PhD, professor of radiology in the Precision Radiotheranostics Research Center, and Parakkal Deepak, MD, associate professor of medicine and co-director of WashU Medicine’s Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center, will evaluate sequential PET/MR imaging and radiopharmaceutical agents to characterize intestinal inflammation. They’ll then classify the strictures based on whether they are predominantly caused by inflammation, fibrosis or a combination of the two.

The Mars Shot Fund was established by Richard L. Wahl, MD, professor of radiology and former MIR director, when he served as SNMMI president. Previous MIR recipients include Vikas Prasad, MD, PhD.

Read more about the study from SNMMI.