The frontier of radiopharmaceuticals with research superstar Professor Louise Emmett

I sat down with Professor Louise Emmett to discuss all things radiotherapy.

With large moves in markets, it’s a relief to check back in with the companies and science behind the stocks making moves.

Professor Emmett is the Director of Theranostics and Nuclear Medicine at St Vincents Hospital, as well as a research leader at the University of New South Wales. She has published over 80 papers and is a global leader in radiopharmaceuticals. You can see a list of her publications here.

Professor Emmett personally leads major trials in the space, and works with commercial companies like Novartis, Telix and Clarity, and is supported philanthropically by the St Vincent’s Curran Foundation, amongst others.

As a clinician, Professor Emmett is intently focused on data, and once Gallium-PSMA was established as superior a few years ago - partly with her help - she changed her entire diagnostic practice over. This is a relevant precedent for investors in the space who might wonder what it would take for a new diagnostic to take market share and chance established clinical practice.

As a true scientist, Louise was careful not to forecast how the future of imaging and therapy in prostate cancer will evolve: rather, it will simply come down to the data.

It was also striking how major commercial outcomes depend so heavily on regulatory regimes. In Australia, there’s clearly work to be done, as our market is too small for companies to run specific trials to prove cost efficacy, which is not required by the US FDA. In the Land of the Free, the FDA leaves commercial decisions to the market.

This means in Australia, some treatments slip through the cracks. Treatments might be approved by the FDA and TGA on safety and efficacy, but if these trials stopped short of proving cost savings, they may not be funded, so public patients go without.

Australia is a relatively small country and studies are expensive, so all too often pharmaceutical companies don’t bother.

Finally, it was clear that radiopharmaceuticals are going to change the future of prostate cancer treatment drastically with radiopharmaceuticals over the next five years.

Most of what we discussed was right on the research frontier, in late-line settings, and the difficult work of establishing which treatment options should be used when, and in what combination.

We’ll all know a lot more in a few short years time. And that’s good news for all of us.

Mike