Radiolabelling, "in vitro" and "in vivo" evaluation of metal-labelled biomolecules for PET imaging

Abstract

Radiopharmaceuticals are a convenient tool in nuclear medicine for diagnosis and treatment of different pathologies. Their application is of great interest in oncology and infectious diseases therefore investigations on the development of nanoparticles for such purposes are under focus. Their characteristics need to be studied before application as many therapeutic drugs suffer from a poor balance between efficacy and toxicity. Nuclear medicine imaging techniques such as PET are being valuable (pre)clinical tools to non‐invasively assess drug performance in pharmaceutical research providing understanding into structure-property relationships in vivo towards optimization to more effective drug delivery. In this study, different metal radioisotopes have been conjugated to diverse biomolecules such as antibodies, small based peptides molecules or polymer based micelles in order investigate their efficiency as disease imaging targets. Hence, versatile radiolabelling strategies were developed according to the requirements of each biomolecule and subsequent evaluations in vitro and in vivo were performed.