Sean D. Carlin, PhD

I am a radiation and cell biologist working in the Radiochemistry and Imaging Sciences Service within Memorial Sloan-Kettering's Department of Radiology. My major interest is the development and evaluation of new radioactive compounds for use in cancer imaging and therapy. I am also interested in identifying new ways to use these compounds for diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring cancer therapy. To do this, we use a combination of biological imaging and nuclear imaging techniques. These techniques allow us to directly compare the location of the radioactive compound with various biological characteristics of the tumor. We perform these comparisons at both the macroscopic and the microscopic levels to help our understanding of how the radiotracers behave and what that reveals about the cancer.

This type of work is a strong collaborative effort and depends upon contributions from scientists with many different backgrounds. I have been very fortunate to have the opportunity to build such collaborations and am grateful for the outstanding resesarch environment that Memorial Sloan-Kettering's Department of Radiology provides.

My current research interests include development and evaluation of PET hypoxia tracers uing small molecules and antibodies specific for cellular proteins induced by hypoxia; the use of PET hypoxia tracers to indicate response following treatments argeted at tomor vasculature; the development of novel cell-based model systems for the investigation of tumor behavior and tracer validation; the use of combined magnetic resonance and PET imaging techniques to help define radiotracer behavior.