Abstract: Radiopharmaceutical Therapy (RPT) has been used for nearly a century (e.g., Na¹³¹I) to treat cancer and other diseases, but the incorporation of new radiopharmaceuticals into the armamentarium of oncologists during most of this time has only led to moderate clinical benefit. In recent years, however, the medical community has seen a renaissance of RPT applications stemming from the success of labeling and delivering highly selective drugs with both imaging and therapeutic isotopes into patients, a process that has been coined ‘radiotheranostics’. With a rapidly growing number of radiopharmaceuticals that have been approved for clinical use or are in late-stage clinical trials there is a great opportunity for medical physicist to have a major impact on this burgeoning field in terms of both research and clinical service especially in the context of patient-specific dosimetry. Over the last decade, the Radiological Engineering and Design (RED) Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin has been developing novel approaches to perform dosimetry calculations for RPT both in the research and clinical setting. This talk will overview previous dosimetry efforts of the RED Lab for pre-clinical and clinical trials and how these efforts are being translated clinically for a variety of different radiopharmaceuticals.  Furthermore, this talk will discuss future growth areas in the field with a particular emphasis on micro- and nanodosimetry. The overall goal of this talk is to help incite future collaborations between UW and MGH around RPT dosimetry.

About the speaker: Professor Bednarz received a BSE and MS at the University of Michigan and Ph.D. at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute all in Nuclear Engineering and Science. Following graduate studies, he spent two years at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston as a research fellow working under the mentorship of Professor Harald Paganetti. Professor Bednarz is currently an Associate Professor at University of Wisconsin, where he also holds a primary appointment in Department of Medical Physics and affiliate appointments in the Departments of Radiology, Human Oncology, and Engineering Physics. Over the last several years his lab has investigated the use of radiopharmaceutical therapy to treat cancers with a specific focus on nuclear medicine imaging and dosimetry. He has published several papers and has given invited talks on this topic including for the European Association of Nuclear Medicine, National Cancer Institute, American Association of Physicists in Medicine, the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, and ICRU.