MR in oncology drug development

Abstract

This article reviews the use of MR in preclinical and clinical experiments to aid drug development. In particular it concentrates on the use of MR to study tumor microvasculature following treatment with anti-vascular agents and the use of MRS to study tumor metabolism following treatment with a variety of anti-cancer agents. The advantages and disadvantages of a variety of techniques including contrast- and noncontrast-enhanced methods are discussed and the data from clinical trials using these techniques are reviewed. Despite the consensus documents produced to date for both dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI and MRS, most of the trials reported used alternative methods, and different nomenclature for the MR parameters used. This continues to inhibit the comparison between novel therapeutics and between different trials with the same compound. Comprehensive data from multicenter trials on the reproducibility of techniques is still lacking in the literature and the implications of the available data on clinical trial design is also discussed.