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Dr. Michael Phelps
In addition to developing several generations of PET scanners with his colleague Dr. Edward Hoffman and CTI, Dr. Phelps and his other Ucla colleagues and students have used PET to study both the biological basis of normal organ functions, as well as numerous disorders of the brain and heart, as well as cancer. In 1981, he established the use of imaging technologies for what today is called “Brain Mapping” for imaging how the brain performs various functions such as seeing, hearing, thinking, working and remembering with PET. Ten years later other imaging technologies such as fMRI were developed for brain mapping. Drs. Phelps and Chugani performed seminal studies on the biological basis of how a child’s brain develops its behavioral repertoire, specialized learning in the formative years and unique means by which the child’s brain can reorganize to compensate for a lesion or surgical resection. Using PET, he and his colleagues in pediatric neurology and neurosurgery identified epileptic tissues, defined the surgical resection criteria and established a clinical service for the surgical treatment of childhood seizure disorders. Along with his colleagues Gary Small, Dan Silverman, Pete Engel, Jeff Cummings and John Mazziotta, Dr. Phelps developed criteria for the use of PET in differentiating various types of dementia (e.g., Alzheimer’s, frontotemporal, vascular, etc.) early in the degenerative process, as well as the biological alterations in early stages of Parkinson’s, epilepsy and Huntington’s diseases. In Huntington’s and familial Alzheimer’s, metabolic abnormalities were identified with PET, 7 and 5 years before symptoms, respectively. It was also shown that PET provided a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s with a 93% accuracy 3 years before the clinical diagnosis of “probable” Alzheimer’s. He and his colleague, Dr. Heinrich Schelbert, developed techniques with PET for the early detection of coronary artery disease and cardiomyopathies. They established PET as a gold standard for determining if tissue in the heart tissue was metabolically viable to allow selection of patients who would benefit from revascularization by bypass or angioplasty and who would not or required heart transplant. Dr. Phelps and his colleagues also developed a technique with PET for imaging the entire body for cancer; to detect tumors, differentiate benign from malignant lesions, determine extent of metastasis and therapeutic effectiveness. Analyzing publications involving over 24,000 patients, Drs. Gambhir, Phelps and Coleman at Duke, established that PET improved detection, staging, detecting recurrent disease and assessing therapeutic responses in 17 different cancers, with an accuracy 8 to 43% higher than conventional imaging and changed treatment selection in 15 to 60% of the patients, depending on the clinical question. Dr. Phelps has also led the worldwide transition of PET from research to clinical service, establishing the first clinical PET service at UCLA, obtaining FDA approval and Medicare and private insurance reimbursement. Drs. Simon Cherry, Arion Chatziioannou and Phelps developed a miniaturized PET scanner, microPET, for imaging mice in biological and pharmaceutical research. Along with his colleagues Drs. Sam Gambhir, Harvey Herschman, Jorge Barrio and Nagichettiar Satyamurthy, a novel technique to image gene expression in vivo with PET was developed. In 2001 Lee Hood, Jim Heath and Phelps established the “Alliance for NanoSystems Biology” between the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Caltech and UCLA to merge systems biology, nanotechnology and molecular imaging. The focus of Alliance is to create new in vitro and in vivo molecular diagnostics along with the technologies to achieve them, based on a systems biology view of disease. Recently, with his colleagues Drs Heath, Quake, Kolb and Tseng, Dr. Phelps developed a program for accelerating, diversifying and simplifying the synthesis of PET molecular imaging probes, biomarkers and drugs with integrated microfluidics and new classes of high affinity and specificity molecular imaging biomarkers using “Click Chemistry” and traditional chemistry on a chip. With colleague Dr. Henry Huang, he developed a software based Kinetic Imaging System (KIS) for performing tracer- and pharmaco-kinetics and pharmacodynamics with PET. This system combines the educational aspects of learning systems with mathematical engines buried in KIS and presented to the user in a simple game like approach for analyzing experimental data from mice to patients to provide the results desired by biologists and pharmaceutical scientists. Dr. Phelps built a new combined basic science and clinical Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA that includes the clinical PET and nuclear medicine services to bring together molecular diagnostics and molecular therapeutics from cells and mice to the care of patients. He also founded the Institute for Molecular Medicine and the Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging at UCLA. Dr. Phelps has:
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Dr. Phelps earned B.S. degrees in chemistry and mathematics at Western Washington State University in 1965, and a Ph.D. in chemistry, at Washington University, St. Louis, in 1970. Subsequently, he was on the medical school faculty of Washington University (1970-75), University of Pennsylvania (1976) and UCLA (1976-present). Dr. Phelps is the inventor of the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanner.