GE HealthCare and Mayo Clinic team up to personalize prostate cancer treatment

GE HealthCare and Mayo Clinic have announced a joint research effort called MI-BET, short for Molecular Imaging Biomarker-Based End of Therapy Trial. The goal is straightforward: figure out whether real-time imaging and blood-based biomarkers can help doctors customize radioligand therapy (RLT) for patients with advanced prostate cancer, rather than putting everyone through the same preset number of treatment cycles.

The study will run out of Mayo Clinic's Rochester, Minnesota campus and builds on a broader research alliance the two organizations signed in 2023. It uses GE HealthCare's StarGuide SPECT/CT scanner alongside MIM Software's MIM LesionID Pro to track how tumors respond to treatment over time. That data gets combined with clinical outcomes and biomarker readings to help the research team understand when a treatment pause might actually benefit a patient.

The idea is that if doctors can see early on how a patient's disease is responding, they may be able to skip unnecessary treatment cycles. That matters both for the patient's quality of life and, the researchers argue, for expanding access to care, since fewer cycles used by one patient could mean more availability for others.

How does it work?

Radioligand therapy works by attaching a radioactive molecule to a targeting agent that seeks out cancer cells. Once it finds them, it delivers a localized radiation dose directly to the tumor. It's a precise approach that has gained significant traction in oncology over the past several years.

Right now, most patients receiving RLT go through a fixed number of treatment cycles regardless of how their body is responding. MI-BET wants to change that by introducing what the researchers call an adaptive approach. Here's how the study is designed to work:

• Patients are monitored with SPECT/CT imaging throughout their treatment to track tumor response in real time.
• Imaging data is combined with blood-based biomarkers and clinical outcomes to build a fuller picture of each patient's response.
• If the data suggests a patient's disease has responded sufficiently, treatment may be paused rather than continued through the full preset cycle count.
• The research team also hopes to identify predictive markers, signals that could tell doctors how a patient is likely to respond before or early in treatment.

Mayo Clinic is also the first U.S. site to test GE HealthCare's next-generation StarGuide GX scanner, which the company says could reduce scan times and improve the precision of tumor assessments. That system has CE marking in Europe but has not yet been approved by the FDA for use in the United States.

Why does it matter?

The push toward personalized cancer treatment has been growing for years, but most of the focus has been on genomics and drug therapy. Theranostics, which combines diagnostic imaging with targeted treatment using the same molecular pathway, is a newer frontier and one that's moving fast.

Geoffrey Johnson, chair of the Radiopharmaceutical Trial Team at Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center, put it plainly: "By evaluating response earlier in their treatment, we can generate data to drive approaches that could help reduce unnecessary therapy while expanding access to care for wider populations."

That access angle is worth paying attention to. Radioligand therapies are expensive and logistically complex. If a study like MI-BET can show that some patients need fewer cycles to achieve the same outcome, it could have real implications for how healthcare systems allocate these treatments. The study also plans to reach beyond major academic centers by working with community organizations and using telemedicine to reduce enrollment barriers.

The context

The 2023 alliance between GE HealthCare and Mayo Clinic was designed to accelerate research at the intersection of imaging technology and clinical care. MI-BET is one of the first concrete studies to come out of that partnership.

Theranostics as a field has grown rapidly since the FDA approved Lutathera for neuroendocrine tumors in 2018 and Pluvicto for prostate cancer in 2022. Both drugs use the radioligand approach, and their success has pushed pharmaceutical and imaging companies to invest heavily in the space. GE HealthCare has been expanding its theranostics portfolio, and this collaboration with Mayo Clinic positions it closer to the clinical research that will shape how these treatments are used going forward.

Sergio Calvo, GE HealthCare's global general manager for theranostics, said the collaboration aims to explore "how imaging and data-driven insights can help inform more individualized treatment decisions." Whether MI-BET delivers on that promise depends on what the data shows, but the study design reflects where oncology is clearly heading: away from standardized protocols and toward treatment plans built around the individual patient.