Imaging liver metastases of colorectal cancer patients with radiolabelled bevacizumab: Lack of correlation with VEGF-A expression

M. Scheer, T. Stollman, O. Boerman, K. Verrijp, F. Sweep, W. Leenders, T. Ruers and W. Oyen

Department of Surgery, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, P.O. Box 9101, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands. M.Scheer@chir.umcn.nl
Sep, 2008

DOI PMID

Abstract

To investigate the correlation between tumour accumulation of In-111-bevacizumab and VEGF-A expression in patients with colorectal liver metastases.Two weeks before resection of the liver metastases 12 patients were intravenously injected with In-111-labelled bevacizumab. Ten minutes and 7 d after injection a whole body scan was acquired. Seven days after the injection, 3D acquisition SPECT of the liver was performed.Enhanced uptake of In-111-bevacizumab in the liver metastases was observed in 9 of the 12 patients. The level of antibody accumulation in these lesions varied considerably. There was no correlation between the level of In-111-antibody accumulation and the level of VEGF-A expression in the tissue as determined by in situ hybridisation and ELISA.In this study, we investigated the correlation between tumour accumulation of radiolabelled bevacizumab and VEGF-A expression in patients with colorectal liver metastases. No clear-cut correlation between the level of antibody accumulation and expression of VEGF-A was found.