Early diagnosis and treatment is the key to cure patients suffering from various forms of cancer, spinal injuries or osteoarthritis. No wonder, medical device makers such as GE Healthcare are betting big on molecular imaging (MI) techniques for detection of diseases. By this initiative, GE Healthcare is helping healthcare providers to understand disease from the beginning. The pharma and biotech industries are also working at speeding up their drug discovery approaches with molecular imaging.
Molecular imaging is a study of the internal workings of a cell and looks for the disease before its symptoms are detected. These techniques in combination with specific biomarkers can help to develop personalised medicines, which is the future trend in the healthcare delivery system. Be it cancer, cardiovascular diseases or neurological diseases, an early diagnosis is the only solution for these maladies. Besides, better care is provided through molecular imaging as the diseases are visualised at the cellular level.
Terri S Bresenham, vice-president and general manager, molecular imaging, healthcare clinical systems, GE Healthcare, says, ?Molecular imaging is a new and rapidly growing healthcare imaging area with over 30% market growth. India today has about 200 nuclear medicine cameras (also called gamma cameras) and 50 PET/CT scanners.?
Healthcare experts feel that India may need at least 1,000 of these systems with current disease situation. ?Currently, we are looking at how we can enhance our range of ?Made for India? products across the imaging chain as well as in life sciences area,?? she explains.
However, these techniques are still expensive. ?We plan to bring indigenisation for our products to make it cost-effective,?? she says. The company has brought out 10 specific ?In India, for India? solutions from its R&D lab in Bangalore. Many of them are also a hit outside the country.
?We continue to develop several solutions and would like to focus on all the areas that we are engaged in?diagnostic imaging, surgery, healthcare IT, lifesciences and medical diagnostics. We may have atleast 10-12 solutions in the pipeline,?? she adds. The latest is design and development of a cost effective PET/CT from India lab.
GE Healthcare has invested $75 million to triple its healthcare R&D lab size to 40,000 square feet lab to develop healthcare solutions in India. Incidentally, it is the largest healthcare lab for GE Healthcare as well as a gold certified energy efficient R&D lab. There is also a fresh investment of $15 million specifically for designing of PET/CT imaging system in India taking into consideration the country?s needs.
Today, three out of four PET/CTs being sold in India are GE Discovery PET/CTs. Until now, these technologies were limited to only metropolitan areas. But India has a number of such small towns which require technologies to reach them. ?Another development is designing and developing a PET/CT specifically for India. The price of a PET/CT is Rs 8 crore and upwards. We hope to make it at least 30-40% cost effective by designing a custom product for India,?? Terri adds. The company provides financing support to the healthcare providers who wish to set up imaging centres and is the biggest non-banking institution to provide financing support in the healthcare market.
Looking into the technology, what does MI mean? Take a cell in the body. It could be a cancer cell, a heart muscle cell that has been lacking oxygen due to a heart attack, or it could be a normal cell that is about to transform into a pre-cancerous or cancerous state. If you have the means to look inside the cell to see how it is working, or to visualise defects that may have been caused by a disease or another clinical condition, then you are performing molecular imaging.
For this to happen, one needs to be able to locate and visualise the affected cells. Specific molecules are needed that can localise onto or inside these cells having a signal. Many imaging techniques are appropriate for this, which is why molecular imaging is not limited to one particular modality.
Certainly, positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT, nuclear medicine) are at the forefront of molecular imaging because it has been easier to prepare the signal molecules with radioactivity. But magnetic resonance (MR) with C-13, along with other new imaging technologies currently being developed and agents still in the world of research, hold great promise.
On the future prospects, Terri says that newer advances in the research of the human genome are leading to the discovery of early disease indicators, often called biomarkers. The translation of this knowledge into aspects of disease expression inside the body (in vivo) is an exciting aspect of molecular imaging.
?Imaging agents that look at the ability of cells to grow, to die or to form new blood vessels are a part of the untapped future potentials of molecular imaging. We are developing such agents and technology right now, and is capable of evaluating hundreds of other biomarkers being discovered,? she adds.
Looking ahead, healthcare analysts are confident on the technology and feel that molecular imaging will dominate and influence the daily practice of medicine for years to come, and contribute to improved patient care from diagnosis to therapy.