Prof. Margret Schottelius

Throughout my entire academic career, my research centred on the development, optimization, full preclinical characterization and ultimately the clinical translation of diagnostic and therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals for Nuclear Oncology, with a strong focus on peptide tracers.

Based on this experience, my current research focuses on developing new peptide-based imaging tools for addressing clinically relevant targets in the context of immune-oncology. The ability to non-invasively quantify and characterize the immune infiltrate of human tumors and their microenvironment is of pivotal importance for patient selection for immune therapies and for subsequent therapy control. Most currently available radiopharmaceuticals for addressing these questions are primarily based on antibodies or antibody fragments, with the inherent disadvantages for clinical imaging. Thus, to meet the clinical need for alternative imaging tools with improved in vivo characteristics, we will approach this challenge from different angles: by addressing different molecular targets with documented predictive value in immuno-oncology, by exploiting a broad palette of low molecular weight targeting vectors with diverse in vivo pharmacokinetic profiles and by implementing state-of-the-art radiolabelling techniques with potential for straightforward clinical translation.

In this context, I am also highly interested in exploiting the potential of tailored structural modifications for modulating and improving tracer characteristics. This includes dedicated introduction of pharmacokinetic modifiers to fine-tune e.g. the lipophilicity, plasma half-life and excretion pattern of a given ligand, while at the same time maintaining high target affinity. The detailed structure-activity (or rather structure-“tracer performance”) relationships emerging from such studies provide a powerful chemical toolbox for further fine-tuning of tracer characteristics as well as for adaptation to different radiolabelling approaches, allowing to counterbalance the influence of a chosen labelling strategy on tracer performance.