Lausanne University Hospital Investigates Use of PENTIXAFOR in Cardio-Vascular Setting

The Gallium-68 based radio-diagnostic PENTIXAFOR promises to significantly improve the sensitivity in the detection of acute myocardial inflammation, which may allow for future early clinical management of patients with myocarditis, avoiding the progression to more severe stages.

To investigate the potential of PENTIXAFOR the CHUV will recruit, on its own account, up to 60 patients in a so-called investigator initiated study (ISS). Eckert & Ziegler, owner of the rights to the CXCR4 targeted tracer used in this study, supports the CHUV team under Professor John Prior and Professor Niklaus Schaefer by providing the compound. Also, part of the CHUV team is Professor Margret Schottelius, Head of the Translational Radiopharmaceutical Sciences lab at CHUV/Agora, who was involved in the preclinical development and clinical translation of PENTIXAFOR and Dr Judith Delage, Head of the Radiopharmacy Unit, in charge, together with her team, of the clinical transfer and of the GMP internal production.

Acute myocardial inflammation is a heterogenic inflammatory disease of the heart muscle involving different clinical pathologies and outcome. The CHUV study focuses on the three entities acute cellular cardiac allograft rejection, cardiac sarcoidosis and the immune checkpoint inhibitor induced myocarditis, as non-invasive diagnosis remains challenging for these life-threatening conditions with current standards.

“Including cardiovascular indications in our prognostic development program in addition to oncology demonstrates the exciting potential of PENTIXAFOR,” comments Dr Jens Kaufmann, co-founder and general manager of Pentixapharm. “We are delighted to collaborate with an excellent centre such as the CHUV in this field, led by Dr Christel Kamani as principal investigator.”

Dr Kamani is triple-certified in cardiology (2017), internal medicine (2018) and in nuclear medicine (2022). Dr Kamani has learned all techniques of multimodality cardiovascular imaging. His research interest focuses on non-invasive multimodality tools for the detection of cardiovascular disease.

PENTIXAFOR is being developed by Eckert & Ziegler’s subsidiary Pentixapharm GmbH primarily as a superiorly sensitive diagnostic for rare blood cancers, among them myelomas, lymphoma and leukaemia.

About Lausanne University Hospital
The Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) is one of Switzerland’s five university hospitals and a well-known center of medical education and research thanks to its collaboration with the Faculty of Biology and Medicine of the University of Lausanne and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).