CMIT-GRAND OPENING - A brand new facility involved with cutting-edge medical technology is having its grand opening in Shreveport later this morning. It is a 23,000-square-foot building that sits at 2120 Kings Highway along what is becoming known as a Health Technology Corridor. Dr. Stephen Lokitz is director of Imaging Sciences for the Center of Molecular Imaging and Therapy, CMIT for short. It is a research organization that will be making novel radiopharmaceuticals that can lead to improved diagnosis and therapy for a wide range of diseases.
“Radiopharmaceutical is a drug that we inject into patients or research subjects. It has a small amount of radiation in it that allows us to watch where it goes so that we can obtain diagnostic or scientific information about a patient or subject that helps tremendously with clinical care in the region. It is the gold standard for things like cancer and it is also extremely valuable for research because we can tag molecular processes in the body and actually see them to gain information to answer questions and to help us develop new therapies and healthcare procedures,” Lokitz said.
Unlike more conventional imaging technologies such as Cat-Scans and MRI – which detect anatomical changes in the body, Radiopharmaceuticals take imaging a step further.
“What our scans do is measure biology and chemistry and decide what’s going on inside the body,” Lokitz explained.
CMIT’s activities will include radiopharmaceutical and translational research, as well as clinical imaging, and bring cutting-edge diagnostics and therapies to patients in the Shreveport area
“What we are planning to do is bring a menu of new radiopharmaceuticals for a variety of new disease states that is somewhat limited in the country, it is certainly limited in the area,” Lokitz said. “And will really vastly increase research opportunities for patients where they might have had to go to M.D. Anderson or UT/Southwest before now they can maybe have this prepared in Shreveport and will actually have a national impact by developing these radiopharmaceuticals to bring into the marketplace.”
The price tag for CMIT’s new 23,000 square foot facility was $19.5 million dollars and is the evolution of the BRF-Biomedical Research Foundations PET Imaging Center, the first molecular imaging scanning and radiopharmaceutical production facility in the state, which opened in 1995. The public is invited to the grand opening at 10 AM at Kings Highway and Mansfield Road in Shreveport.
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