MSc Arghavan Jahandide will have her public defence for her PhD thesis titeled :
“MOLECULAR IMAGING OF AUTOIMMUNE MYOCARDITIS USING NEW PET TRACERS IN EXPERIMENTAL MODELS”
The defence will be held in English on 10 January 2025 at 12.00 (TYKS, T-hospital, Risto Lahesmaa auditorium, Hämeentie 11, Turku).
Our group PI Prof. MD, Antti Saraste (Turku PET Centre and Turku University Hospital) will act as the custos and the opponent will be Prof. MD, Kirsi Timonen (Hospital Nova of Central Finland, Jyväskylä).
The electronic disseration book can be found through our university library link https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-29-9995-8
A brief review of the doctoral dissertation :
Myocarditis, an inflammatory heart condition, is difficult to diagnose because its symptoms can mimic many other illnesses. A common tool to detect heart inflammation is positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) imaging with a sugar-like tracer called 18F-FDG. However, this tracer can also be taken up by healthy heart muscle, making it difficult to distinguish between healthy and inflamed tissue. To address this problem, my study explored the use of three alternative PET tracers that might more accurately detect active inflammation in the heart.
I tested three PET tracers for their ability to target inflammation in heart tissue in an experimental model of myocarditis: 18F-FOL, which binds to a specific receptor on activated immune cells; [68Ga]Ga-NODAGA-RGD, which targets molecules involved in new blood vessel formation; and [68Ga]Ga-DOTA-Siglec-9, which identifies proteins associated with white blood cell movement. PET/CT imaging showed that all three tracers had high uptake in inflamed heart tissue, whereas there was only minimal background signal in healthy heart tissue. The results were further confirmed with tissue samples of patients with myocarditis associated with sarcoidosis, a chronic systemic autoimmune disease.
This research found that 18F-FOL, [68Ga]Ga-NODAGA-RGD, and [68Ga]Ga-DOTA-Siglec-9 are promising PET tracers to detect active heart inflammation, and encourage further development as a possible diagnostic tools in human myocarditis.