Neeta Pandit-taskar MD, MBA

Neeta Pandit-Taskar, MD, MBA, is a clinician-scientist who is board-certified in nuclear medicine and nuclear cardiology. She has more than two decades of broad experience in clinical nuclear medicine and related research. She joined MSK in 2000. She is also Clinical Director of the Center for Radioimmunotargeted Imaging and Theranostics of the Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy.

Before coming to MSK, she was head of the nuclear medicine department at a cancer center in India. At MSK, she collaborates closely with medical oncologists and surgeons to provide conventional and novel methods of diagnosing and treating patients with radiolabeled agents in a variety of malignancies. Her research involves radioimmunotargeted agents, small molecules and peptides, alpha emitters, and the use of novel PET tracers and techniques such as PET/CT and PET/MR for early assessment of disease status and response.

As the principal investigator of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 grant from the National Cancer Institute, she is investigating new imaging techniques to detect and monitor neuroblastoma in children using PET/MR. The goal is to reduce radiation exposure and provide a rapid single-day imaging assessment to monitor disease and therapy response.

She is also co-leading studies in theranostics in pediatric malignancies such as neuroblastoma, brain tumors, and other tumors including desmoplastic small round cell tumors. Her focus is on developing novel theranostic strategies with radiopharmaceuticals.

She is studying the use of radiolabeled monoclonal antibodies to detect and treat cancers. Her early research focused on the optimization of biodistribution and understanding the kinetics of radioimmunotargeted agents in a variety of cancers. These include radiolabeled antibodies 8H9 and 3F8 for pediatric cancers such as metastatic neuroblastoma and brain tumors, as well as radioimmunoPET imaging and radioimmunotherapy for renal cancer, prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, lymphoma, and colon cancer.