SNMMI Mars Shot Prize Awarded to PET-RTRC Investigators

A project involving two WashU Medicine Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology (MIR) faculty and PET-RTRC investigators received the Drs. Jane & Abass Alavi Mars Shot Research Award from the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging to study symptomatic strictures in Crohn’s disease fibrosis. 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.

David H. Ballard, MD, assistant professor of radiology and TR&D 2 service project leader, and Yongjian Liu, PhD, professor of radiology and TR&D 2 leader, alongside Parakkal Deepak, MD, associate professor of medicine, aim to establish a foundation for biologically informed, noninvasive decision-making in treating symptomatic strictures in Crohn’s disease. They will evaluate sequential PET/MR imaging and radiopharmaceutical agents to characterize intestinal inflammation, then classify the strictures based on whether they are predominantly caused by inflammation, fibrosis or a combination of the two.

Read more about the study from MIR.