Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology (Korean J Nucl Med Technol)

Open access, Peer Reviewed

Indexed in KCI, DOAJ

pISSN 1229-9901
eISSN 2982-8406

Review article

Synthetic Approach to 99mTc-labeled SPECT Radiotracers with Multi-nitroimidazoles for Hypoxia

1Deparment of Nuclear Medicine, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, Korea
2Deparment of Medical Science, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, Korea

Correspondence to Hee-Kwon Kim, Department of Nuclear Medicine, Jeonbuk National University, 20, Geonji-ro, Deokjin-gu, Jeonju-si, Jeollabuk-do, 54907, Rep. of Korea, Tel : :+82-63-250-2768, E-mail : hkkim717@jbnu.ac.kr

Volume 28, Number 1, Article 1, May 2024. Korean J Nucl Med Technol 2024;28(1):1. https://doi.org/10.12972/kjnmt.20240001
Received on March 22, 2024, Revised on April 23, 2024, Accepted on April 23, 2024, Published on May 31, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Hypoxia, defined as the deficiency of oxygen, is a significant hallmark of cancers presenting in the majority of solid tumors. Detection of tumor hypoxia is essential in cancer diagnosis to prevent cancer progression, metastasis, and resistance to cancer therapies in clinical practices. Single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is one of the methods studied and applied for hypoxia detection with the use of radiolabeled imaging agents in which 99mTc is the common radioisotope used for radiolabeling. Nitroimidazoles are the hypoxia-targeting moieties presenting in numerous 99mTc-radiolabeled imaging agents due to their bio-reducible ability in hypoxic environments. Recently, in addition to 99mTc-labeled radiopharmaceuticals containing one nitroimidazole unit, there has been considerable attention given to 99mTc-radiopharmaceuticals bearing two or more nitroimidazole units. This review summarizes the synthesis of hypoxia-targeting chelators and radiolabeling processes to produce these 99mTcradiopharmaceuticals for SPECT imaging.
Keywords

Radiopharmaceuticals, SPECT, technesium-99m, hypoxia, tumor

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