Current Pharmaceutical Biotechnology - Volume 11, Issue 6, 2010

Over the last decade, the field of molecular imaging has witnessed tremendous expansion, partly owing to the rapid evolvement of imaging instruments dedicated to small animal studies which enabled non-invasive investigation of many biological events that could not be easily interrogated before these tools became available. This special issue of Current Pharmaceutical Biotechnology will cover a broad array o Read More

Molecular imaging represents an extremely important advancement in patient care and numerous agents have been developed and are being studied. Hundreds of molecular imaging agents currently exist for use in multiple modalities such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), ultrasound, optical imaging, general nuclear medicine and positron emission tomography (PET). In PET, only a very s Read More

Positron emission tomography (PET) is used in the clinic and in vivo small animal research to study molecular processes associated with diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and neurological disorders, and to guide the discovery and development of new treatments. This paper reviews current challenges of advancing PET technology and some of newly developed PET detectors and systems. The paper focuses on four a Read More

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a powerful and rapidly developing area of molecular imaging that is used to study and visualize human physiology by the detection of positron-emitting radiopharmaceuticals. Information about metabolism, receptor/enzyme function, and biochemical mechanisms in living tissue can be obtained directly from PET experiments. In particular, the interest in 18F-labeled proteins remains hi Read More

The current way to increase efficacy of cancer therapy is the use of molecular recognition of aberrantly expressed gene products for selective treatment. However, only a fraction of the patients have tumors with a particular molecular target. Radionuclide imaging of molecular targets might help to stratify patient for cancer treatment. Affibody molecules are scaffold proteins, which can be selected for high affinity reco Read More

Malignant melanoma represents a serious public health problem and is a deadly disease when it is diagnosed at late stage. Though 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (18F-FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) has been widely used clinically for melanoma imaging, other approaches to specifically identify, characterize, monitor and guide therapeutics for malignant melanoma are still needed. Consequently, many probes Read More

The advancement of molecular imaging hardware and disease targets has driven the demand of novel probes for diagnosis of human diseases. The high-throughput property of phage-display techniques makes the fast developments of these probes possible. The antibody and peptide phage display libraries have been widely used in ligand-selections for a variety of targets in tumors including osteosarcomas, pancreatic ductal Read More

Molecular imaging provides a powerful tool for early disease detection, characterization, and real-time monitoring of therapeutic responses. Central to molecular imaging is the development of imaging probes. Receptors that are overexpressed in tumors have been potential targets for cancer imaging using targeted molecular probes. Since many cancer types simultaneously overexpress several receptors, the design of Read More

Molecular imaging has become a research focus in recent years, which provides an effective information acquisition, analysis and processing methodology at cellular and molecular levels for biomedical study. As an important molecular imaging technique, optical molecular imaging, especially fluorescence and bioluminescence imaging, has attracted remarkable attention in tumor study and drug development for its Read More

Fluorescence-based molecular imaging in small animals is having a major impact on drug development and disease research and the ability to detect multiple molecular species at once is becoming increasingly important. Unlike bioluminescence, in fluorescence, ubiquitous autofluorescent signals from the skin need to be separated from that of labeled fluorophores to ensure proper quantitative data. Since its introduction in Read More

Currently, work with subnanomolar concentrations is routine while femtomolar and even single-molecule studies are possible with some efforts getting high on single-molecule biophysics and biochemistry. Methodological breakthroughs, such as reducing the background light contribution in single-molecule studies, which has plagued many studies of molecular fluorescence in dilute solution, and particularly in live cells, have r Read More

Raman spectroscopy, based on the inelastic scattering of a photon, has been widely used as an analytical tool in many research fields. Recently, Raman spectroscopy has also been explored for biomedical applications (e.g. cancer diagnosis) because it can provide detailed information on the chemical composition of cells and tissues. For imaging applications, several variations of Raman spectroscopy have been developed to e Read More

Quantum dots (QDs) are new generation of fluorophores with superior optical properties. For biological applications of QDs, proper surface modification and further conjugation with biomolecules are necessary to make these nanocrystals biocompatible as well as target-recognizable. Preparation of QDs bioconjugates was reviewed in this paper to demonstrate general strategies in the bioconjugation of QDs and typical Read More

The prospect of mobilizing the power of the immune system in the fight against cancer has fascinated generations of immunologists. After decades of sporadic successes scattered amongst frequent failures, the field of tumor immunology is now poised to take advantage of a greatly improved understanding of the molecular and cellular mechanisms of immune tolerance. Further enhancing the prospects of cancer immunother Read More

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) hold tremendous therapeutic potential in a variety of diseases. Over the last decade, non-invasive imaging techniques have proven to be of great value in tracking transplanted hESCs. This review article will briefly summarize the various techniques used for non-invasive imaging of hESCs, which include magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), bioluminescence imaging (BLI), fluorescence, singl Read More

The noninvasive detection of cell death has significant diagnostic values. Molecular events in apoptosis and necrosis are a source of valuable surrogate markers for the detection of cell death. Two classes of imaging agents are being developed for imaging caspase activities and redistribution of membrane phospholipids, respectively. The current review looks at the molecular recognition mechanisms of existing a Read More

Recent clinical practice for the management for cancer patients has begun to change from a statistical “one-size fits all” approach to medicine to more individualized care. Pre-treatment biomarkers (i.e. genetically and histologically based) have a growing role in providing guidance related to the appropriate therapy and likelihood of response; they do not take into account heterogeneity within the tumor mass. Thus, a biomark Read More

Hyperpolarized (HP) 13C labeled compounds can be used as MR contrast agents to investigate metabolic pathways in vivo in almost real time. To date, a high proportion of reported studies have utilized HP 1-13C pyruvate to investigate intracellular metabolism in tumors and other tissues. The long T1 relaxation time of the carboxylate carbon enables the 13C signal of the pyruvate to be followed for nearly 2 minutes following in Read More