Clinical characterization of hypoxia in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) by 18F-FAZA PET and pimonidazole.

Abstract

4049 Background: We previously demonstrated correlation between hypoxia and aggressive tumor biology in orthotopic, patient-derived pancreatic xenografts (Chang et al. Cancer Res 2011). With the development of hypoxia-directed therapies, there is a need to understand the range and relevance of hypoxia in PDAC patients. We therefore launched two complementary clinical trials using 2-nitroimidazole-based hypoxia probes. Methods: PIMO-PANC involves pre-operative administration of pimonidazole to patients (pts) undergoing PDAC resection. Hypoxic percent (HP) of tumors is determined by semi-automated image analysis (on Aperio’s Genie) of multiple histological sections stained for pimonidazole by immunohistochemistry (IHC). FAZA-PANC uses the positron emission tomography (PET) tracer fluoroazomycin arabinoside (18F-FAZA) to evaluate hypoxia by functional imaging. 2 hours post-injection of (5.2 MBq/kg) 18F-FAZA, static scans are acquired followed by computed tomography for anatomic registration. Skeletal muscle is a non-hypoxic reference tissue to define standardized uptake values (SUV), tumor to muscle uptake ratios (T/M’s) and a threshold for hypoxia. Results: PIMO-PANC has enrolled 29 pts and FAZA-PANC 16. IHC analysis of the first 10 pt tumors demonstrates considerable intra- and inter-tumoral heterogeneity of hypoxia (HP: 1 to 26% across pt tumors); minimal hypoxia (< 5%) was observed in 3 pts. 18F-FAZA-PET in the first 11 pts demonstrates SUVmax from 1.02 to 1.83, median T/M's from 0.84 to 1.31. A threshold of 1.27 SUVmax defines HP of 0 to 60% with minimal hypoxia (<10%) in 5 pts. Conclusions: There is significant heterogeneity of hypoxia across the spectrum of clinical PDAC (local to metastatic disease) using the 2-nitroimidazole hypoxia probes pimonidazole and 18F-FAZA. Given the intra-tumoral heterogeneity of hypoxia by histopathology, functional imaging is the preferred method to assess hypoxia in PDAC patients. Importantly, both methods identified a group of PDAC tumors with low levels of hypoxia. This is relevant to the on-going development of hypoxia-targeting strategies. Accrual to PIMO-PANC is on-going and will address the prognostic relevance of hypoxia in PDAC. Clinical trial information: NCT01542177 and NCT01248637.