Myelination is one of the fundamental biological processes in the development of the vertebrate nervous system. Disturbance of myelination is found to be associated with progression in many neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS). Tremendous efforts have been made to develop novel therapeutic agents that prevent demyelination and/or promote remyelination. These efforts need to be accompanied by the development of imaging tools that permit direct quantification of myelination in vivo. In this work, I describe the design, synthesis and evaluation of some novel imaging probes that are capable of direct quantification of myelination in vivo . These probes are now available for further imaging studies that are based on PET, NIRF and PET-NIRF multimodality.
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