A Closer Look at Drugs Just as imaging technologies are guiding
and, in some cases, replacing the scalpel, they are
revolutionizing the evaluation of new cancer drugs.
Traditionally, a drug’s effectiveness has been determined by its
impact on patient survival, or by measuring the diameter of a
tumor on a series of X-rays or CT scans taken over the course of
several weeks. That’s too slow for oncologists like Craig
Lockhart, M.D., assistant professor of Medicine in the
Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. If there was a way of telling,
within 48 hours, that a patient’s tumor was not shrinking or
otherwise responding to the drug, “we’d be able to save that
patient a lot of time and potential toxicity,” he says. John
Gore, Ph.D., director of the Vanderbilt University Institute of
Imaging Science, is equally impatient. “We want to have more
quantitative, more sensitive and more specific measures” of drug
response, he says. “Imaging is the only way to do that.” Gore
envisions radiologists and imaging scientists from t