QuiremScout (Quirem Medical) has received CE mark, making it available for clinical centres throughout Europe. QuiremScout is designed to advance the SIRT (selective internal radiation therapy) work-up procedure. It does this by improving the accuracy of predicting lung shunting and the intrahepatic distribution, which aims to optimise SIRT patient selection and treatment planning. QuiremScout will be exclusively distributed by Terumo.
“The commercial introduction of QuiremScout is an important next step towards what we believe will be a true paradigm shift in SIRT,“ says Peter Coenen, president of Interventional Systems Terumo EMEA. “QuiremScout paves the road for increasing confidence in SIRT patient selection and to allow for personalised treatment planning based on each patients’ individual needs. QuiremScout completes our SIRT portfolio, which is built around QuiremSpheres and Q-Suit.”
Until QuiremScout, Tech-99m-MAA (99mTc-MAA) has been used for SIRT work-up procedures around the world, in the absence of any alternative. The limited predictive value of 99mTc-MAA has been recognised by some in the field, leading to the development of QuiremScout.
“QuiremScout has the potential to truly improve the accuracy of the SIRT work-up procedure. It leverages the unique features of Holmium-166 PLLA-microspheres,” Frank Nijsen, Chief Scientific Officer of Quirem Medical and associate professor of Interventional Nuclear Medicine at the Radboud University Medical Center, The Netherlands, explains. “Holmium microspheres emit primary gamma photons and can therefore be imaged in low concentrations using SPECT. Because the scout dose particles are identical in terms of size, weight and shape as those used for QuiremSpheres therapy, the scout dose gives an improved prediction of the post-therapeutic lung shunt. We expect QuiremScout will also lead to improved prediction of the extrahepatic deposition and intrahepatic absorbed dose distribution.”
“QuiremScout has improved our clinical SIRT practice,” Marnix Lam, Head of Nuclear Medicine at the University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU) says. “Based on data from more than 80 patients, we have demonstrated that QuiremScout is safe in this population and is a better predictor for lung shunting than 99mTc-MAA. As a result, we really feel that we have optimised our SIRT patient selection. In addition, we have established that QuiremScout is also a better predictor for the post-treatment intrahepatic distribution when compared to 99mTc-MAA. Notably, QuiremScout in combination with 99mTc-MAA-colloid enables Dual-Isotope SPECT/CT technology allowing for rapid auto-segmentation of the healthy liver tissue. In our experience, QuiremScout microspheres outperforms 99mTc-MAA. Therefore, we have decided to completely switch to QuiremScout for all QuiremSpheres work-up procedures.”
