Dr. Witte describes himself as the "conductor" or "choreographer" in these discussions. "I'm not the scientist developing these techniques and modalities," he says. "My contribution is seeing particular biological problems to which they can be applied and how, down the road, this would work in humans."
Dr. Witte is best known for his contributions to understanding the cause of certain blood cancers and immune disorders, findings that have led to the development of improved therapies for patients, including a widely used molecularly targeted therapy for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML).
But now, combining his experience as a cancer biologist and immunologist with that of a broadly interdisciplinary group of colleagues (chemists, engineers, physicists, mathematicians, nuclear medicine, and others), he is looking for targets within the immune response - and targets that he will be able to track using this new technology.
"When a new tool comes into biology, it always accelerates our understanding of a problem," says Dr. Witte. "Over the coming years, we are going to see a greater and greater reliance on whole body molecular imaging techniques to evaluate any treatment, whether chemotherapy or antibody, in preclinical and clinical trials."
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Contact: Sarah Goodwin
asbmb04@bellsouth.net
770-270-0989
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology
15-Jun-2004