Zhengxin (Jason) Cai, PhD, Assistant Professor, Yale University PET Center, has been awarded an Exploratory/Development R21 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Cai’s research project titled, "Development of BBB Permeable PD-L1 PET Imaging Agents,” will involve synthesis and radiolabeling a library of small molecule PD-L1 ligands as potential PET imaging probes, aiming to find one probe that could penetrate the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and allow for the quantification of PD-L1 in brain tumor or metastasis.
Collaborators include Drs. Bernadette Marquez-Nostra, Jiangbing Zhou, Alfred Bothwell, Katerina Politi, and Viswanathan Muthusamy, who will provide their unique tumor animal models or PDXs for the evaluation of the newly developed PET tracers, and Dr. Elias Lolis, who will help with the crystallography study and assist with the rational design of new ligands.