Issue 24, 2009

‘Two is better than one’—probes for dual-modality molecular imaging

Abstract

Molecular or personalised medicine is the future of patient management and healthcare, and molecular imaging plays a key role towards this goal. However, amongst molecular imaging techniques, no single modality is perfect and sufficient to gain all the necessary information. For instance, optical fluorescence imaging is difficult to quantify—especially in tissue more than a few millimetres in depth within a subject; magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has superb resolution but low sensitivity and positron emission tomography (PET) has very high sensitivity but poor resolution. The combination of multiple molecular imaging techniques can therefore offer synergistic advantages over any modality alone. However, the problem cannot be solved by simply adding two different classes of imaging probes together, unless they happen to have identical pharmacodynamic properties. Therefore, multi-modal contrast agents or imaging probes have been developed to solve this problem. Despite the great wealth of information that such probes can provide, their development is far from trivial and represents an important challenge to synthetic chemists. In this feature article, we provide an overview of recent findings in the synthesis, evaluation and application of dual-modality molecular imaging probes.

Graphical abstract: ‘Two is better than one’—probes for dual-modality molecular imaging

Article information

Article type
Feature Article
Submitted
17 12月 2008
Accepted
10 3月 2009
First published
05 5月 2009

Chem. Commun., 2009, 3511-3524

‘Two is better than one’—probes for dual-modality molecular imaging

L. E. Jennings and N. J. Long, Chem. Commun., 2009, 3511 DOI: 10.1039/B821903F

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements