Near-infrared fluorescence molecular endoscopy detects dysplastic oesophageal lesions using topical and systemic tracer of vascular endothelial growth factor A

Abstract

The incidence of oesophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) is steeply rising. Early lesion detection is a critical factor for improving disease prognosis. We developed and investigated wide-field near-infrared fluorescence molecular endoscopy (NIR-FME), using systemic and topical administration of a fluorescence-labelled antibody against vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGFA). Fourteen patients with Barrett’s oesophagus (BE) underwent endoscopic mucosal resection (EMR) combined with NIR-MFE. From a total of 20 confirmed aberrant lesions identified with NIR-FME, 4 lesions were missed by high-definition (HD) narrowband imaging (NBI) and white-light endoscopy (WLE). This overall 25% detection enhancement advocates NIR-FME as a promising ‘red-flag’ technique for improving early oesophageal lesion detection. ClinicalTrials.gov ID NCT02129933.  Worldwide, >450 000 people are diagnosed with oesophageal cancer each year. In the western world, at least 80% of these cancers concern EAC.1–4 Late-stage disease detection challenges the efficacy of therapies, resulting in 400 000 deaths each year. Therefore, there is a pressing need for new endoscopic techniques that enable early EAC detection. Endoscopic imaging of targeted fluorescent agents directed against cancer-specific cellular and subcellular moieties, that is, fluorescence molecular endoscopy (FME), has been heralded as a novel method for oesophageal dysplasia and cancer detection.5 FME enables surface and subsurface visualisation of cancer-specific pathophysiology, going beyond the surface-only morphology and tissue discolourations visible with HD-WLE.6–10 In this study, we investigated for the first time real-time NIR-FME of EAC and dysplasia. A pilot study in patients with BE was based on a novel custom-built NIR fluorescence endoscope, paired to a HD-WL clinical scope (online supplementary figure 1) and employed the anti-VEGFA antibody bevacizumab, labelled with the NIR-fluorescent 800CW. The potential of VEGFA as an early discriminating target in BE was first confirmed by immunohistochemistry, demonstrating that all dysplastic tissues expressed VEGFA (online supplementary figure 2). ### Supplementary file 1 [SP1.pdf] The study furthermore compared systemic versus topical tracer administration during clinical inspection of …