Treatment decisions in oncology are increasingly guided by information around the biologic characteristics of tumors. will review the biologic and biochemical principles underlying the imaging studies, review the radiopharmaceuticals that have been developed, discuss issues in the quantitative interpretation of imaging data, and review clinical progress. Because both types of tracers have undergone only preliminary clinical evaluation, we spotlight basic science and preclinical work as a basis for understanding the results obtained to date and for predicting future developments. In critiquing PET imaging of cellular proliferation and tumor receptors, it is important to consider two functions for PET in oncology [17,25,32]: 1) PET provides a powerful buy 942999-61-3 clinical tool for malignancy treatment planning and therapy monitoring. 2) PET is a unique methodology for examining the clinical biology of malignancy and can therefore function as a transitional bridge between biologic discovery and clinical medicine. Some of the tracers and imaging methods developed in a research establishing may be impractical for routine clinical imaging, owing to factors such as short tracer half-life, difficult tracer synthesis, and/or complex imaging protocols. However, failure to investigate radiopharmaceuticals Rabbit Polyclonal to Neuro D or imaging approaches simply because they are not practical for everyday use in the clinic would deprive medical science of potentially valuable tools for understanding how cancer behaves Work with tritiated thymidine led to the development of thymidine for PET imaging, labeled with 11C in the methyl [38,39] and ring-2 positions [40,41]. Both tracers have been used successfully in patient studies. The difference in the labeling results in different profiles of labeled metabolites, as highlighted in Figure 1. Methyl-labeled thymidine generates a number of labeled acidic metabolites [42,43]. The compounds typically have access only into tissues that also accumulate thymidine; therefore, they may not contribute to the image background to the same extent as more freely distributed labeled metabolites [43,44]. In contrast, the principal metabolite of 2-[11C]thymidine, [11C]CO2, is readily transported into tissue and is therefore fairly ubiquitous [45,46]. It is, however, less likely to be trapped in tissue than the metabolites of the methyl-labeled compound [47C49] and therefore more confidently distinguished from thymidine incorporated into DNA in quantitative models of thymidine kinetics [50]. In either case, to fully interpret time-activity curves obtained after injection of [11C]thymidine requires accounting for labeled metabolites. buy 942999-61-3 Figure 1 Thymidine catabolism in vivo. The labeled species for ring-2 and methyl-labeled thymidine are indicated as follow: () Indicates labeled species for ring-2-labeled thymidine and (*) indicates labeled species for methyl-labeled thymidine. Abbreviations … Thymidine analogs The rapid catabolism of thymidine has two disadvantages: 1) Once metabolized, labeled thymidine is no longer available for incorporation into DNA, and thus only a fraction of the injected dose is used for measuring DNA synthesis. 2) Labeled metabolites confound image interpretation. In addition to these factors, the half-life of 11C (20 minutes) is impractical for buy 942999-61-3 routine clinical imaging. These considerations prompted development of thymidine analogs for PET imaging (Figure 2). The analogs have fewer labeled metabolites and use longer-lived isotopes, but they are not components of normal DNA. Therefore, their uptake in tissue may not directly reflect the rate of thymidine precursor incorporation into DNA and may be influenced by factors other than cellular proliferation. Figure 2 Chemical structure of thymidine and labeled analogs IUdR/BudR, FMAU, and FLT (see text for full names). (*) Indicates sites that have been labeled with positron emitters. X in the IUdR/BUdR structure is iodine for IUdR and bromine for … One strategy has been to develop analogs labeled with isotopes with a sufficiently long half-life to allow imaging after labeled metabolites are largely cleared from tissue. Two such tracers are IUdR labeled with 124I (half-life = 4.2 days) [51] and BUdR labeled with 76Br (half-life=16 hours [52]). There is considerable experience with both IUdR and.