PET radiopharmaceuticals in radiation treatment planning – Synthesis and biological characteristics

During the last decade several different PET radiopharmaceuticals entered into the clinic and positron emission tomography (PET) became an important tool for staging of cancer patients and assessing response to therapy. Meanwhile FDG-PET has also found application in radiation treatment planning. Potential radiopharmaceuticals for radiation treatment planning may also include tracers allowing monitoring of proliferation, amino acid metabolism, hypoxia, lipid metabolism and receptor expression. Here the syntheses of a selection of clinically tested promising tracers are summarized and the different molecular mechanisms for accumulation are discussed which may help to choose the appropriate tracer for planning radiation treatment strategies.