EXPLORER project awarded $15.5 million to build total-body PET scanner
A research team at the University of California, Davis has been awarded a $15.5 million, five-year grant to build a total-body PET scanner.
The team, led by principal investigators Simon Cherry, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering at UC Davis, and Ramsey Badawi, PhD, professor of radiology at UC Davis, won one of eight National Institute of Health (NIH) Transformative Research Awards to fund its EXPLORER project.
The researchers believe a total-body scanner could substantially drop radiation dose and decrease scanning time.
“The vision of the EXPLORER project is to solve two fundamental limitations of PET as it is currently practiced,” Cherry said in a statement. “The first is to allow us to see the entire body all at once. The second huge advantage is that we’re collecting almost all of the available signal, which means we can acquire the images much faster or at a much lower radiation dose. That’s going to have some profound implications for how we use PET scanning in medicine and medical science.”
“There are many questions that we couldn’t possibly ask before—and now we will be able to ask them,” Badawi said in the same statement. “This is not just a big instrumentation grant. It’s going to give us a tool that will allow us to see things we’ve never seen before.”
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are also involved in the EXPLORER project.
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