PD Dr. Cristina Müller receives the Marie Curie Award

Prostate cancer is among the most frequent cancers in men, and one of the treatment options is radionuclide therapy. PD Dr. Cristina Müller is a group leader with Prof. Dr. Roger Schibli at the Center for Radiopharmaceutical Sciences, a joint endeavor between the ETH Zurich, the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), and the University Hospital Zurich, and is working towards clinical application of radiopharmaceuticals based on an interdisciplinary approach involving radiopharmaceutical chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, pharmacy and pharmacology. Cristina Müller presented her work on “Terbium-161 for PSMA-Targeted Radionuclide Therapy of Prostate Cancer“ at the Annual Conference of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) in Dusseldorf in October 2018 for which she received the Marie Cure award for the best research paper. In an international collaboration, the researchers could show that ¹⁶¹Terbium is a potentially more effective therapeutic alternative to ¹⁷⁷Lu-PSMA-617. PSMA-617 is a small molecule, targeted to prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA), which emerged as an interesting target for radionuclide therapy of metastasized castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC). PSMA can be labeled with various radionuclides that kill the tumor cells. Cristina Müller et al. could show that ¹⁶¹Tb proved – due to its physical properties – to have an improved absorbed dose profile compared to ¹⁷⁷Lu-PSMA-617. The data presented a promising basis for future clinical translation of ¹⁶¹Tb-PSMA-617 for the treatment of mCRPC.

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