image: Nicole M. Maughan, PhD, receives SNMMI Mars Shot Fund award.
Credit: Image courtesty of SNMMI.
Reston, Virginia (September 24, 2024)—The SNMMI Mars Shot Research Fund is pleased to announce that Nichole M. Maughan, PhD, medical physicist in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Intermountain Health in Provo, Utah, has been selected as the recipient of a $100,000 Community-Based Theranostics Award from the 2024 Mars Shot Fund. Maughan’s Mars Shot grant was awarded based on her proposal, “Establishing centralized dosimetry process with peripheral SPECT/CT image acquisition within an expanding radiopharmaceutical therapy program throughout the Mountain West."
Radiopharmaceutical therapy is a growing treatment modality that has expanded beyond academic centers and into community practices. Despite its clinical efficacy, treatments are not personalized, often utilizing standard, fixed activity prescriptions.
“Sometimes, patients might benefit from additional therapy cycles beyond the standard regimen, or they may have indications that may increase the risk of complications with the use of radiopharmaceutical therapy,” said Maughan. “Three-dimensional, voxel-based dosimetry provides clinicians the opportunity to understand the potential risks to patients in these situations, however, imaging is needed for up to three days after treatment. This can be cost prohibitive and logistically challenging for patients within community-based healthcare systems.”
To address this issue, Maughan will initiate a radiopharmaceutical therapy dosimetry process that obtains data from images acquired throughout a multi-state health system but are processed and analyzed centrally. A simplified phantom filling and imaging protocol for SPECT camera calibration will be developed, and imaging protocol compliance will be tracked across one to three centers to demonstrate feasibility. Maughan will also design a centralized dosimetry workflow that allows most patients to receive post-treatment imaging within a two-hour drive while maintaining quality in personalized dosimetry. Maughan will be working alongside her co-investigators, Dr. Kathryn Morton, a nuclear medicine radiologist, and Dr. Dustin Boothe, a radiation oncologist and the co-lead of Intermountain Health’s Theranostics program, to optimize the imaging and dosimetry protocols.
“This study directly utilizes techniques and tools developed at large academic centers and translates them to the community practice setting,” noted Maughan. “Ultimately, we hope our model can be used by other healthcare systems to improve patient care and management.”
Maughan’s primary research interests include clinical implementation of new radiopharmaceutical therapies and quantitative imaging and dosimetry of these therapies, including Y-90 microspheres, 177Lu-DOTATATE, and 177Lu-PSMA-617. She is an active member of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, participating in subcommittees and working groups to provide guidance and education to the radiopharmaceutical therapy community.
The SNMMI Mars Shot Research Fund, established in 2023, is a forward-looking glimpse into the future of nuclear medicine. It provides resources that translate visionary nuclear medicine imaging, radiopharmaceutical therapy, and data science research or projects into tools or treatments that will help improve the lives of patients. The Mars Shot Fund acknowledges the generous donations from Oliver Buck, Udo J. Vetter, and the ITM corporation to the SNMMI Mars Shot Research Fund in partial support of the Community-Based Theranostics Award.
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About the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging
The Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) is an international scientific and medical organization dedicated to advancing nuclear medicine and molecular imaging—vital elements of precision medicine that allow diagnosis and treatment to be tailored to individual patients in order to achieve the best possible outcomes.
SNMMI’s members set the standard for molecular imaging and nuclear medicine practice by creating guidelines, sharing information through journals and meetings and leading advocacy on key issues that affect molecular imaging and therapy research and practice. For more information, visit www.snmmi.org.