The long term goal for the UK PET Core Lab is to help enable research PET studies to be performed, analysed and reported in the same open and repeatable manner as are other biomedical tests that are used in cancer research. This would facilitate the use of PET data in the drug approval process, and eventually may make it possible to analyse large PET datasets, acquired from multiple sources, using the sort of bioinformatics techniques (and 'data mining') that are now being used to analyse molecular profiling and other types of experimental data.