PET-RTRC Visits Howard University

Howard University has recently been established as one of the PET-RTRC’s service project sites. Funded by the center’s grant renewal through the P41 funding mechanism, the site will have access to mature center products otherwise unavailable, providing an opportunity for the advancement of research and thriving collaborations. 

Members of the center’s innovation hub — based at WashU Medicine’s Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology — visited Howard to assist in establishing the university’s small animal PET facility and associated radiochemistry. The facility features a newly acquired imaging system and will utilize PET-RTRC-produced imaging agents to develop preclinical imaging products. Collaborators at Howard will work with TR&D 1 (led by Zhude Tu, PhD), QI2R (led by Richard Laforest, PhD), and the Technology Training and Dissemination Core (led by Buck Rogers, PhD, and Michael Nickels, PhD) as part of an outreach initiative to form relationships with universities primarily serving students and communities that are underrepresented in medicine.

The visit started with presentations by the Howard University team to inform the WashU team about ongoing projects, which led to discussions on how PET studies could potentially be incorporated into their ongoing projects and what kind of resources they need to initialize the radiochemistry and PET imaging program for small animals. This was followed by presentations by Drs. Rogers, Nickels and Laforest that emphasized the value of molecular imaging with PET, the capabilities of the WashU cyclotron facility, and preclinical imaging, performance assessment and quality control. The day ended with a tour of the PET/SPECT/CT facility, the MRI Preclinical Imaging Lab and radiochemistry facilities. Overall, it was an excellent visit with productive interactions between the two groups.