Congratulations to Jorge Oldan, MD, Associate Profession in the Cardiac and MIT Divisions on receiving a Research Seed Grant from RSNA.
His application was among the top-ranked and approved for funding by the R&E Board of Trustees. The grant is in the amount of $40,000. His project is titled: “18-fluorofuranylnorprogesterone (FFNP) PET/CT as a potential biomarker of response to progesterone therapy in complex atypical hyperplasia (CAH) and grade 1 endometrial cancer (EC).”
“Many patients with early cancer of the uterus can’t have surgery,” explains Dr. Oldan. “One option to treat them is inserting an intrauterine device (IUD) in their uterus that releases a hormone that keeps the cancer from growing. However, we don’t know which patients this will help. We have a radioactive injected dye, FFNP, that binds to the same receptors in the body as that hormone, and may tell us if the hormone will work to keep the cancer from growing. This grant will help fund our efforts for this research.”
“We want to inject (and scan) 8 patients with this dye before treatment with the hormone-releasing IUD and see if patients who take up the dye in their uterus are more likely to have their cancer shrink or stop growing. We’ll take a biopsy after the scan to see what their cancer looks like at the time; we want to see if patients for whom the dye didn’t bind to the uterus are the same patients whose cancer shrinks or stops growing from the IUD. We’ll confirm whether they’ve gotten better by taking biopsies of their uterus after the scan.”