According to scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, a noninvasive approach for assessing lung inflammation should accelerate efforts to develop drugs for inflammatory lung conditions like cystic fibrosis and pneumonia.

These scientists have used positron emission tomography (PET) scans to monitor artificially induced inflammation in the lungs of healthy volunteers. PET scan is a new imaging process that can help doctors monitor the conditions of patients with inflammatory lung diseases and should make it easier to test potential anti-inflammatory drugs in trials.

[In Photo: a PET image, the arrow shows inflammation of the lungs]

Until now, when we wanted to assess whether a new drug decreased lung inflammation, the options for specifically measuring active inflammation were not pleasant," says lead author Delphine Chen, M.D., chief resident in nuclear medicine at the medical school's Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology. "We could perform a bronchoscopy and gather samples directly from the breathing passages, or we could have patients inhale a saline solution and cough it back up."

To make it possible to detect lung inflammation with PET, Chen and her colleagues employed an imaging technique commonly used to diagnose cancer and monitor its treatment. Scientists reported the results in a paper published online by The Journal of Applied Physiology.

This new imaging process will lead to new drug trials against lung inflammation conditions.

News and Photo Source: [Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis]