Abstract #1439

Stafford R, Shetty A, Elliott A, Brown G, Kassouf W, Pisters L, Stephens L, Tinkey P, Bidaut L, Hazle J

Convective delivery of therapy is a minimally invasive alternative for systemic delivery of chemotherapy and other cancer treatments, such as gene therapy, for localized tumor sites. Convective delivery of gene therapy in prostate cancer may help maximize gene transfection. This research investigates the feasibility of using MRI to non-invasively assess the distribution of a convectively delivered solution in an in vivo canine prostate model. Differing injection schema were investigated using a surrogate solution of Gadolinium-DTPA and methylene blue (to mimic vector distribution), injected intraprostatically. Methylene blue distributions on pathology photographs correlated well with the Gadolinium-DTPA distributions observed from MRI.