Current Research and Scholarly Interests
Our group's primary objectives are:
1) Novel radioligand and radiotracer development.
We will develop novel PET (Positron Emission Tomography) imaging agents with MIPS and Stanford faculty as well as other outside collaborations including academia and pharmaceutical industry. Although my personal research interests will be to discover and design of candidate probes that target molecular targets in the brain, our group focus will primarily be on cancer biology and gene therapy. In conjunction with our state-of-the-art imaging facility, promising candidates will be evaluated by PET-CT/MR imaging in small animals and primates. Successful radioligands and/or radiotracers will be extended towards future human clinical applications.
2) Designing new radiolabeling techniques and methodologies.
We will aim to design new radiolabeling techniques and methodologies that may have utility for future radiopharmaceutical development in our lab and the general radiochemistry community.
3) Radiochemistry production of routine clinical tracers.
Since we also have many interests with many Stanford faculty and outside collaborators, our efforts will also include the routine radiochemistry production of many existing radiotracers for human and non-human use. Our routine clinical tracers will be synthesized in custom-made or commercial synthetic modules (i.e. GE TRACERlab modules) housed in lead-shielded cells and be distributed manually or automatically (i.e. Comecer Dorothea) to our imagers.