Clinical

The market:

Tracer imaging is a massive part of medical imaging.

Medical imaging is crucial to modern medicine and patient care. Tracer imaging is a class of imaging technology used to answer critical medical questions, and has wide usage worldwide.

Key medical imaging procedures that measure heart function, cancer spread, and blood flow use tracer imaging. Tracer imaging only sees the tracer and not the tissue, but it reveals information on how the body is functioning. This is in contrast to anatomical imaging techniques such as MRI, X-ray/CT, Ultrasound, and X-ray, which see tissue without using tracers.
Currently, all 50 million worldwide tracer imaging scans per year are performed using nuclear medicine techniques, which involve imaging radionuclides. Of these, 40 million scans (80%) use a single radionuclide, Tc-99, which is manufactured in a limited number of nuclear reactors, none of which are located in the USA. The market size for tracer imaging is significant, with over $4 billion spent on tracer doses annually.

Unfortunately, major limitations in tracer imaging hold back patient care despite our advances over the past 50 years:

Current tracer technologies do not provide answers to every clinical imaging question. For instance, it is difficult to determine whether immunotherapy is effective, and the availability of techniques that can directly measure immunotherapy function would be transformative.
Nuclear medicine imposes unnecessary costs on patients, doctors, and the healthcare system. Using radioactive tracers creates workflow issues, including repeated visits for injections and imaging, scheduling difficulties for exams, radiation exposure for patients and providers, intermittent supply shortages, billion-dollar nuclear reactors, and limited regional and international distribution.

The problem:

Tracer imaging has room for improvement in application capability and workflow.

The solution:

Tracer imaging with MPI enables new clinical applications with flexible, non-radioactive workflows.

We have developed a new, foundational technology to support the latest cell-based immunotherapies and improve the delivery of common clinical procedures without the unnecessary costs of nuclear medicine.

Currently, we lack a rapid method for measuring a patient's solid tumor response to a cell-based immunotherapy, leaving us with no timely feedback for improving their treatment plan. However, our technology, MPI, can track cell-based immunotherapies and provide feedback, which is a new capability not supported by other existing clinical imaging techniques.
MPI can serve as a drop-in replacement for the majority of nuclear medicine scans. This includes the sentinel lymph node biopsy, myocardial perfusion scan, and lung ventilation/perfusion. In contrast to nuclear medicine, using MPI eliminates the need for repeated visits, scheduling, radiation safety precautions, and concerns about shortages and limited distribution that are associated with the use of radioactive tracers.

Learn more about these applications in our applications pipeline below.