Translational Imaging Research Program in Radiopharmaceutical Sciences

Project Summary. The Washington University T32 postdoctoral training grant “Translational Imaging in Radiopharmaceutical Sciences” (abbreviated as “TIRS”) is a multidisciplinary initiative to train the next generation of PET molecular imaging scientists to design, develop, and translate PET radiotracers for noninvasive detection of pathophysiology mediating development of neurodegenerative diseases and ADRDs. This training program will be spearheaded by Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology (MIR), an institution known worldwide as a frontier for translational PET research, and a preferred first stop for radiopharmaceutical scientists for learning applied nuclear imaging research. To accomplish this novel training objective, the T32 TIRS program brings leading scientists from radiological sciences division of the MIR, the Knight Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (Knight ADRC), Molecular Imaging Center, Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences, Cyclotron-GMP facility and PET-Radiotracer Translational and Resource Center (P41 program through NIBIB) and faculty members as mentors from 12 departments to accomplish aims of proposed training for investigation of new or existing biomarkers mediating AD and ADRDs with overlapping pathophysiology, assist in noninvasive early detection of diseases, facilitating drug development and allow stratification of treatment paradigms for managing patient care. Of note, the T32 TIRS mentors include chemists, biochemists, biomedical engineers, immunologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, radiochemists, and radiologists. The postdoctoral trainees will be drawn through various participating departments at the medical school, and Danforth campus, including other universities in metropolitan St. Louis area, and nearby academic institutions in the Midwest. We are proposing to train 3 postdoctoral trainees each year, wherein each trainee will be enrolled for 2 years of training, over 5 years of the T32 program. All trainees will be trained through mechanism of dual- mentorship (one in basic science and other physician-scientist to provide multidisciplinary training) and all trainees will be trained in responsible conduct of research including instructions in methods of experimental rigor for accomplishing reproducible science. Of note, scientists training at the interface of neuroscience and radiopharmaceutical sciences are also rapidly declining nationwide in general, and there is a clear shortage of radiopharmaceutical scientists across the board in the US workforce. Therefore, our T32 postdoctoral training program TIRS would be expectedly to substantially meet this critical shortage of radiopharmaceutical scientists trained at the interface of neuroscience and radiopharmaceutical sciences. Although our current T32 TIRS programmatic mission is directed for trainees at ADRDs, we envision that trained molecular PET imaging research scientists could also serve other departments and fields including the medical oncology, therefore, extending significance and scope of TIRS training program well-beyond the field of neuroscience. Overall, we (the T32 TIRS program director and co-directors) are confident that postdoctoral scientists trained through this program will be transitioning into faculty positions nationwide and will be expected to serve the field of diagnostic nuclear medicine in neuroscience for several decades.