Investigation of a Novel Gadolinium Conjugated Peptide as a Theranostic for Primary and Secondary Bone Cancers

I am an orthopaedic surgeon with a special interest in treating people with bone cancers. Bone cancers affect a wide age range and can cause major disability to our patients. I operate on around 60 bone cancer patients a year- for some the procedures are quite effective and satisfactory but there are some patients where the surgery becomes very complicated or we do not have an effective treatment option. There is a desperate need for more effective way of treating our patients and helping make sure that when we need to operate, we do the best surgery possible for them. This new treatment holds promise for doing exactly that- helping us assess each person’s bone cancer properly whilst treating it at the same time.

There are between 16,000 and 24,000 patients suffering from bone cancer at any one time in the UK. At least 40% of patients with a cancer starting outside of the bone such as the lung, kidney, prostate or breast will develop secondary bone cancer. In the 670 UK patients who develop cancer from the bone itself, many are children, teenagers and young adults. In the US there are around 500,000 people undergoing treatment each year for bone cancers and worldwide the number is estimated at 6.8 million.

My ambition is to utilise the research collaborations and facilities available to me to test and make available to most effective new treatments for patients suffering from bone cancers. It is vital that the testing is done to make this as safe as possible and therefore all the studies we design include ways of looking out for possible side effects and adverse reactions that our patient may have to the new treatments. Once the safety testing is done then our aim is to run large clinical trials to see how effective the new treatments can be at improving outcomes for our patients with musculoskeletal disorders.

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