News — Following FDA clearance, patients receiving radiation treatment for cancer from around the country now benefit from a University of Michigan-developed code that was created over the last two decades.
Dose Planning Method for Radiopharmaceutical Therapy, commonly referred to as DPM_RPT, a Monte Carlo code, is now available with GE HealthCare’s MIM Software.
Starting with the patient’s nuclear medicine images, DPM_RPT simulates how electrons and photons are transported in the body during radiopharmaceutical therapy, a systemic therapy that targets cancer cells with a radioactive drug.
Monte Carlo radiation transport is an industry-standard tool in dosimetry, the practice of measuring how radiation will be absorbed by a human body when tailoring treatment.
“Twenty-five years ago we wanted to work towards achieving something better than just giving every patient undergoing radiopharmaceutical therapy the same treatment, regardless of their disease state, body habitus or body function,” said Yuni Dewaraja, Ph.D., professor of radiology at the University of Michigan.
“At that time, all patients were prescribed the same amount of the radioactive drug, and we wanted to personalize that to give each patient the right amount.”
DPM_RPT also has exciting new applications for theranostics, the rapidly growing field of personalized medicine in which radioactive drugs are used for simultaneous diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.
While Monte Carlo algorithms have existed as a statistical method since 1949, they were historically too slow to be used effectively for medical application in clinical settings.
Advances in algorithm development, equipment and computer technologies, however, now allow Dose Planning Method dosimetry calculations to happen in less than a minute.
A pipeline that combines artificial intelligence tools with the DPM_RPT Monte Carlo code streamlines the process to create a simulation for how much radiation will reach the tumor and organ areas of the body down to every individual pixel of a patient’s imaging.
Dewaraja began working on DPM_RPT software over two decades ago with Scott Wilderman, Ph.D., who was a colleague from her graduate school days at Michigan Engineering.
Wilderman was developing general Monte Carlo radiation transport methods including for external beam radiotherapy.
Early funding from the NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering secured by Dewaraja to develop imaging and dosimetry methods in nuclear medicine led to expansion of the Dose Planning Method software for the current application in radiopharmaceutical therapy and its use for clinical research in multiple cancers.
The bench-to-bedside translation of the code from the subject of research to an offering from GE HealthCare, however, began four years ago.
Dewaraja’s team received an Academic-Industry Partnership grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute for the express purpose of working with industry partners to develop dosimetry tools for the clinical environment.
To achieve these goals, Michigan researchers exclusively licensed their work in 2023 with the help of Innovation Partnerships to MIM Software Inc., who were acquired by GE HealthCare in April 2024.
“If we didn't have this academic-industry collaboration grant, we would have had the code, and we would have done the research here, but it would have been very hard to expand it to make it available for everybody,” Dewaraja said.
The researchers behind Dose Planning Method for Radiopharmaceutical Therapy are now focused on providing even more tailored therapies by including more patient-specific clinical factors and biomarkers in addition to dosimetry to build multivariable models.
Using artificial intelligence tools, akin to those found in large language models, they hope to gather multi-modal and holistic health information for even more personalized predictions for how therapies will work and should be administered.
Tech transfer(s)/Conflict(s) of interest: Yuni Dewaraja has a paid relationship with MIM Software Inc. and is an inventor of the DPM_RPT code licensed to MIM Software Inc. Dewaraja and Scott Wilderman receive licensing revenue from MIM Sofware Inc. for “DPM-RPT: The Dose Planning Method (DPM) Monte Carlo Code for Voxel-Dosimetry in Radiopharmaceutical Therapy (RPT)."
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