BII Seminar: In vivo measurement of ABC transporters
03 Jul 2012
Thursday 26 July 2012 (1pm) in Room 1.006, AV Hill Building, with lunch from 12.30-1pm in the café area.
In vivo measurement of ABC transporters in rodents and man with PET
Speaker: Oliver Langer, Medical University of Vienna and Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH
Adenosine triphosphate-binding cassette (ABC) transporters, such as P-glycoprotein (Pgp, ABCB1) and breast cancer resistance protein (BCRP, ABCG2), are expressed in various organs and tissues and transport a wide range of structurally diverse molecules thereby exerting a considerable impact on drug absorption, distribution and excretion. Changes in ABC transporter expression and function are thought to be implicated in various diseases, such as cancer, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
The non-invasive nuclear imaging method positron emission tomography (PET) allows for assessing the density or function of molecular targets in vivo by externally monitoring the tissue distribution of intravenously administered target-selective radiotracers.
The availability of PET radiotracers to measure ABC transporter function or expression could be useful in personalized medicine to preselect cancer or epilepsy patients with increased ABC transporter activity, who will benefit from treatment with ABC transporter modulating drugs. In addition, PET imaging with radiolabelled drugs is a very powerful approach to assess drug-drug interactions in vivo in human subjects.
To date two different kinds of PET imaging probes have been described to measure ABC transporters in vivo: i) radiolabelled transporter substrates ii) radiolabelled transporter inhibitors. The design of new imaging probes to visualize efflux transporters is inter alia complicated by the overlapping substrate recognition pattern of different ABC transporter types.
The present talk will summarize the speaker’s experience in the PET visualization of ABC transporters in animal disease models (epilepsy, cancer) and in human subjects.
About the speaker
Oliver Langer studied pharmacy at the University of Vienna, where he graduated with a Master’s degree in 1995. He then obtained a PhD degree at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden in 2000, where he specialized in the development of radiotracers for the imaging of neurotransmitter systems with positron emission tomography (PET).
Since 2002 he has been employed at the Department of Clinical Pharmacology at the Medical University of Vienna, where he became Associate Professor (“Privatdozent”) in Radiopharmaceutical Chemistry in 2006.
In 2006, he became Senior Scientist at Austrian Institute of Technology in Seibersdorf, which is Austria’s largest non-university research organization. In his research, he uses preclinical and clinical PET to address different questions related to drug disposition and pharmacodynamics.
Registration
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