Towards Personalized Medicine: Molecular Imaging and Internal Radiotherapy

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Recent progress in biology, chemistry and physics has open up unprecedented opportunities to advance the treatment of many diseases by employing radiopharmaceuticals in a "personalized medicine" paradigm. Nuclear medicine (NM) imaging techniques, such as PET and SPECT, are already well recognized for their molecular characteristics. Both techniques rely on the use of biologically active molecules, labeled with radioactive isotopes, to provide physicians with diagnostic information about the anatomy and/or physiology of patients. This not only helps to diagnose diseases, but also allows doctors to locate molecular receptor sites, study biological markers expressed by diseased cells, and monitor the presence and/or extent of specific disease processes. Additionally, in targeted internal radiotherapy (IRT), the same molecules labeled with therapeutic agents are used to deliver treatment to locations previously identified in diagnostic studies.