Please note the question mark!
I am just back from a cancer symposium and part of that dealt with detection using pet scans and new tracers. As we all know pet scans can produce false positives and also miss cancerous tissue that is too small to register or does not take up enough glucose. What they (Emory) are proposing if to use other tracers (other than the radioactive glucose the normally give you). This idea is not all that new but what was impressive was the use of a cyclic peptide analogue. This worked beautifully well for brain tissue. If you look at your pet scan the brain normally (with glucose) lights up like a Christmas tree and you cannot see a tumor in that background. This (simple peptide) is expected to be on the market (GE) within the next 2 years and they are testing it for H&N cancer now. The hope is that background will be lower for muscle tissue as well. Concerns are inflammation and scar tissue.

M