Wahl on Nuclear Medicine’s Role Treating Deadly Diseases

Richard L. Wahl, MD, director of Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, spoke with WUSA 9 Get Up DC about how nuclear medicine, particularly PET radioactive drugs, is being used to better understand and improve treatments for diseases like ovarian cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

New research from the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, of which Wahl is the current president, says the nuclear medicine diagnostic tools can detect characteristics of Alzheimer’s in the brain before symptoms develop and that preclinical trials using radioactive drugs to treat ovarian cancer in mice can decrease the size of tumors.