FDA Approves New Imaging Tool To Detect Advanced Prostate Cancer

The Food and Drug Administration has approved a new imaging tool used to find advanced prostate cancer.

NBC News reports medical imaging company Lantheus' new tracer will provide doctors with important visual aid to spot metastatic prostate cancer cells that were previously difficult to observe.

Prostate cancer ranks as the second leading cause of cancer deaths in men in the United States, trailing only lung cancer, with more than 34,000 men dying annually in relation to the disease, according to data from the American Cancer Society.

Dr. Michael Morris, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, said prostate cancer often spreads into the bones, which makes it hard to detect through previous imaging techniques.

"It's really hard to take pictures of what's going on inside of bone," Morris said, adding that traditional scans usually discovered problems in the tissue surrounding bones where damage had already occurred.

"Now we don't have to wait for that," Morris said, who was involved with clinical trials of the tracer. "We can detect it much more clearly and much earlier than we could before."

The new Lantheus tracer will use a tracer molecule to seek out protein found on most prostate cancer cells called prostate-specific membrane antigen after injecting into the bloodstream and lighting up cells during a PET scan, NBC News reports.

A similar technique, which also seeks out PSMA, was approved by the FDA in December to be used at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, San Francisco hospitals, who had been researching similar technology since 2015.

"We've been using it for many years and it works great," said Dr. Thomas Hope, director of molecular therapy in UCSF's Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging. "We can actually see where the disease is and now people are getting targeted radiation."

"It's redefining how we think about prostate cancer," he said.

The Lantheus technique's approval will be the first of its kind for advanced prostate cancer commercially nationwide.

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