Clinical Applications of P.E.T. in Oncology

Dr Simon Sutcliffe, CEO and President of BC Cancer Agency:

I’d like to bring the session to a close. I’d just like to recap that the specific purpose of this day was to come up with guidelines. I think I am really quite encouraged that there has been a really high degree of concordance between the interpretation of the local experience, based upon our experience, with that of the international faculty and the literature, and recognizing that there are management variations that can preclude the total concordance of guidelines, recognizing that in the absence of any dedicated funding for PET from government it is likely that the government will be fairly conservative in starting up. So our guidelines will probably be fairly conservative. I still think with those comments, we probably still have a substantial body of agreement on what should be considered as the appropriate indications for PET to be funded through the health care system, representing the state of the art practice in oncology.

The next steps for us will be to refine this to clear guidelines, which I think we can do fairly readily, to translate those into numbers of studies based upon BC population demographics and to put that proposal before the ministry, with our strong statement that in open discussion and in the context of international experience and world literature, these would be the recommendations that we would make, and we would ask for initial funding for those particular indications.

And it is very clear, we need to go down that route very quickly because all of the BC, well the vast majority of the BC, work that you have seen today, has been done on philanthropic funding and clearly now I think we have passed the point where philanthropy should be paying for PET for indications where the international field feels it now is a state of the art procedure. So we will move along as rapidly as possible in that direction.

I’d like to thank IPET as a co-sponsor. I would like to thank our guest faculty, Drs Coleman, Baum, Conti, Shreve and Wahl. I think you will all join me in recognizing the depth and breadth of experience that they have brought, and the significant support that they have given to our thinking around the indications of PET. So please accept my thanks gentlemen—I am most appreciative of your joining us here today.

I would like to thank our local faculty and those who also were on our steering committee for putting this conference together, our sponsors: our colleagues at Siemens, CTI, ADAC Laboratories and PETNet, as well as IPET and the BCCA. And finally, I would like to thank all of you for working your way through this meeting and for joining us so fully in the audience participation and the discussion of the presentation material today. Thank you very much indeed.

And that concludes the session.