Exploring An Alien World - A Professor's Take On Molecular Imaging

Scientists studying the complexities of the human body are like aliens trying to understand the complexities of the planet Earth, Professor Sanjiv Sam Gambhir of Stanford University told an audience at Imperial College London.

Delivering this year's Hounsfield lecture, Professor Gambhir described how the science of molecular imaging is transforming medicine and giving unprecedented insights into how the body works.

To explain the importance of molecular imaging, Professor Gambhir asked his audience to imagine they were aliens tasked with studying the Earth. Early studies would concentrate on topographic images showing continents, oceans and cities, but these would still leave observers wondering how the planet functions.

"You would have the desire to know more, to really see how a complex city works," Professor Gambhir said. "The same issues apply when we try to understand the human body - we need to see whats going on at a cellular level."

Alien detectives, he concluded, would eventually decide they had no option but to beam themselves down to Earth to carry out a thorough exploration.

"This is the root of what molecular imaging allows us to do. Instead of carrying out house-to-house searches we are carrying out cell-to-cell searches."

Stressing that the field is still in its infancy, Professor Gambhir pointed out that molecular imaging faces a range of problems that need to be solved. A main challenge is the need to image many different events at the same time, vital to the area of cancer biology in which it is usually not good enough to image one property of a cell at a time. The large turnout for his lecture, however, gave him encouragement that the expertise could be developed to overcome these challenges.

"My biggest happiness is that more and more young people are coming into the field," he commented. "It isnt so long ago that we could only get four or five people coming to a lecture like this."

The annual Hounsfield memorial lecture was instituted by Imperial's Imaging Sciences Centre in 2004 to recognise the contribution of Sir Godfrey Hounsfield to the development of medical imaging systems. The lecture is billed as an opportunity for a world leading researcher in imaging science to review the latest developments.

SOURCE: Imperial College