Early Prediction of Pathology Response of Chemoradiotherapy With FLT PET

The goal of the study is to obtain preliminary data and initial estimates of the FLT ability-PET to identify pathCR patients who have esophageal carinoma or non-small cell lung cancer and undergo Neoadjuvant Therapy (Chemoradiotherapy, Chemotherapy or Radiation Therapy) prior to surgery. Achievement in pathCR after pre-operative Neoadjuvant Therapy is associated with improved patient outcomes; however, there is no effective method to predict pathological response before surgery. Thus, a patient with pathCR , for whom esophagectomy or thoracoscopy may be unnecessary, still undergoes surgery and faces the prohibitive side effects of this surgical procedure. Additionally, Neoadjuvant Therapy is associated with considerable morbidities and tool to predict and avoid ineffective therapy are lacking. Because deregulated proliferation is one of the hallmarks of cancer and its proliferation rate is associated with aggressive biologic behavior and response to therapy, imaging the proliferative state of cancer cells by non-invasive functional imaging is of great interest. Recently 18F-FLT (3'deoxy33'-18F- fluorothymidine) has been reported as a promising PET radiopharmaceutical for imaging cancer proliferation and has been validated in several in vitro \& in vivo models. However, only a few studies addressed its role in depicting changes in cancer proliferation and assessing response to Neoadjuvant Therapy, and none of these studies have focused on esophageal cancer and lung cancer. We propose to conduct a pilot study to learn the optimal FLT PET imaging timepoint during the early course of Neoadjuvant Therapy that has the highest predictive value for pathCR in patients with esophageal cancer or lung cancer.