TECHNETIUM-99mRADIOPHARMACEUTICALS: CURRENT SITUATION AND PERSPECTIVES

摘要

The ~(99m)Tc radiopharmaceuticals currently in clinical use in nuclear medicine have been developed from the mid-1960s up until the early 1990s by a combination of coinci-dence,'trial and error and rational design. Further development of Tc chemistry (tricar-bonyls, Hynic, conjugates, etc) created new opportunities and resulted in promising new ~(99m)Tc labelled tracer agents but no new Tc essential' radiopharmaceuticals have been approved within the last 15 years. Both scientific and economic reasons are the cause of this stagnation, such as the difficulty of preserving biological activity upon derivatization of a biologically active compound with a ~(99m)Tc complex, the high cost of development and limited return on investment of diagnostic drugs, and the increasing performance and competition of other imaging modalities. Ongoing developments in detector characteristics and SPECT camera design may be expected to result in continued investment and interest in ~(99m)Tc compounds and other SPECT tracer agents.