January 14, 2009 – Leaders from the medical field and academia urge Obama Administration, Congress, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense to increase federal funding for research into imaging technologies for less invasive and more accurate diagnosis of prostate cancer.
“We lack the accurate imaging tools that would help us perform better biopsies and design more optimal treatments for our patients,” said Theodore DeWeese, M.D., chair of Radiation Oncology at Johns Hopkins University, who was among the conference participants to support the consensus statement.
Meeting this week in Bethesda, MD, at a conference convened by the AdMeTech Foundation, the medical experts discussed strategies for speeding development of imaging technologies for prostate cancer modeled after life-saving mammograms for women. They reportedly agreed that advanced prostate imaging would save lives and an estimated $5 billion per year in healthcare costs.
“As physicians, scientists, educators and patients, we are personally concerned about the human and societal costs of prostate cancer. We firmly believe that more accurate imaging technology would lead to better patient care, including guidance for diagnosis, biopsy and minimally invasive therapy,” today’s consensus statement reads. “The AdMeTech Foundation conference clearly demonstrated that real and important improvements in prostate cancer care are at hand if we are resolved to increase the national investment in prostate diagnostics.”
Conference participants also signed a letter to Dr. Raynard S. Kington, acting director of the National Institutes of Health, urging increased federal research funding for prostate cancer imaging diagnostics.
The clinical experts met over the past two days as a result of the meeting between leadership of the AdMeTech Foundation, advocacy groups, and industry with Dr. Elias Zerhouni, director of NIH, in the spring of 2008. The experts unanimously agreed that prostate cancer care is in a state of crisis due to the lack of reliable imaging tools critical to guiding early detection, accurate diagnosis and the most effective and least invasive treatment.
For more information: www.admetech.org
July 02, 2024 
