Leveraging Programmatic Collaboration for a Radiopharmaceutical Clinic

Abstract

Radiation oncologists, radiopharmacists, nuclear medicine physicians, and medical oncologists have seen a renewed clinical interest in radiopharmaceuticals for the curative or the palliative treatment of cancer. To allow for the discovery and the clinical advancement of targeted radiopharmaceuticals, these stakeholders have reformed their trial efforts and remodeled their facilities to accommodate the obligations of a program centered upon radioactive investigational drug products. Now considered informally as drugs and not beam radiotherapy, radiopharmaceuticals can be more easily studied in the traditional clinical trial enterprise ranging from phase 0–I to phase III studies. Resources and physical facilities allocated to radiopharmaceuticals have brought forth new logistics and patient experience for safe and satisfactory drug delivery. The clinical use of theranostic agents—that is, diagnostic and therapeutic radionuclide pairs—has accelerated radiopharmaceutical development.