Robert Van Dam
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Chemistry
Positron-emission tomography (PET) is a medical imaging method that tracks tiny amounts of radioactive 'tracer' molecules in the body. It can reveal rare targets deep in living tissue, such as receptors in the brain.
- Fields
Chemistry
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
positron emission tomography
radiochemistry
radiotracers
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Integrate in situ radiation detectors into droplet-array radiochemistry platforms to measure radioactivity at different stages of each parallel reaction.
- Add automated sampling of droplet reactions for analysis by radio-TLC or radio-UPLC (methods that separate and quantify radioactive products), reducing manual pipetting and human error.
- Use high-throughput droplet methods to optimize synthesis of five low-yield PET neurotracers, develop at least one new tracer, and establish best practices for high-throughput radiochemistry optimization.
More about the research
New tracers can help researchers understand how diseases start and progress, and help develop new drugs. But developing and validating a tracer can take years or even decades. A major bottleneck is radiochemistry, the chemistry of making radioactive compounds. Optimizing these syntheses is slow, expensive and uses a lot of reagents and isotope, so researchers test only a few conditions and a few candidate compounds.
Why it matters
Faster tracer development could make it easier to image receptors and other targets in the living brain in health, disease and aging. It could also help develop probes for newly discovered targets and switch tracers to more practical isotopes, such as fluorine-18 instead of carbon-11. This would help neuroscience researchers and drug developers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Zhude Tu
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research
Track S1PR1 levels over time in macaques with MPTP-induced brain injury using [11C]CS1P1 PET, then verify the scans with autoradiography, antibody staining and ELISA protein assays on brain tissue.
Nashaat Turkman
Stony Brook University, NY·Neuroscience
Optimize and automate the radiosynthesis of [18F]NT311D, a radioactive tracer that binds class-IIa HDAC enzymes, and test it with PET imaging in rats.
Junwei Du
University of California-Davis, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Build a whole-body mouse PET scanner with about 0.5 mm resolution, using 128 detectors made of 0.5 mm LYSO crystal arrays (crystals that flash when hit by gamma rays) read out from both ends by silicon photomultipliers.
The school
University of California-Los Angeles: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 803 research doctorates a year.
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