Evaluation of Gallium-68-HBED-CC-PSMA Imaging in Prostate Cancer Patients

The investigators are imaging patients with prostate cancer using a new PET imaging agent (Ga-68 HBED-CC PSMA) in order to evaluate it's ability to detection prostate cancer in patients with high risk disease prior to prostatectomy, patients with biochemical recurrence and patients with castrate resistant prostate cancer.

Imaging and staging of prostate cancer is critical for surgical and treatment planning. Patients with suspected metastatic prostate cancer will be imaged using Gallium-68 labeled HBED-CC PSMA in order to demonstrate its utility. The investigators plan to utilize this data to obtain further approvals of the HBED-CC PSMA compound, so that this agent will become available for clinical imaging in prostate cancer patients. This compound has been shown to be superior to choline based PET agents for the staging of prostate cancer, both Carbon-11 and Fluorine-18 compounds. But this compound was not patented and therefore no company or private entity will make the investment required to bring HBED-CC PSMA to market. In the vacuum of availability, academic groups must take the lead in order to collect the necessary data for future FDA approval. This study focuses on three patients populations that are imaged. In the pre-prostatectomy population, the primary objective is to determine the sensitivity and specificity for detection on nodal metastasis. In the biochemical recurrence population, the primary objective is to determine the sensitivity of recurrence location. In the castrate resistant prostate cancer population the primary objective is to determine if PSMA PET detects more metastatic lesions than conventional imaging.