Our diverse mix of world-renowned faculty are conducting research in every aspect of Nuclear Medicine from bench to clinic. Our radiochemists, led by Dr. Peter Scott, have funding from the National Institutes of Health to develop new, more efficient, methods for producing radiopharmaceuticals in our state-of-the-art Cyclotron and Radiochemistry facility, and are also using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to design and evaluate new radiopharmaceuticals for diseases and disorders that we cannot currently image in the clinic. A number of Medical Physicists also work in the Division, and conduct research into kinetic modeling and PET data analysis (Dr. Bob Koeppe), building new AI methods for calculating the therapeutic dose needed to destroy tumors (Dr. Yuni Dewaraja), and the development of new radiopharmaceuticals for diagnostic imaging in cardiology and oncology (Dr. David Raffel). Many of our clinical faculty are involved in translational research in neurology, oncology and cardiology, as well as theranostics, and lead many industry-sponsored clinical trials.
This highly collaborative group of experts in radiochemistry, medical physics and nuclear medicine enables our clinics to develop and translate new radiopharmaceuticals into clinical trials. We conduct our own clinical research with new radiopharmaceuticals developed at UM, and agents for diagnostic imaging and therapy developed by our researchers are now in use all over the world, and a number have also received FDA approval for clinical care. We also provide new and established radiopharmaceuticals for clinical research. These include investigator-initiated studies with UM faculty, as well as partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotech companies from all over the world who are conducting advanced clinical trials with our teams.