Therapeutic and diagnostic radiopharmaceuticals#

Medical application of ionizing radiation and radioactive isotopes were considered almost immediately after their discovery. The intense research interest in radioactivity, materials structure, subatomic particles and in the establishment of physical principles resulted in milestone inventions such as the radiotracer principle, particle accelerators, nuclear reactors and detectors sensitive enough to indicate different types of radiations even at very low intensities. This technical development together with advancements in pharmaceutical chemistry led to the establishment of nuclear medicine as a new discipline, and currently the prevalence of radiologic applications in today’s medicine is obvious as tens of millions of nuclear medicine procedures are performed annually in more than 10,000 hospitals worldwide (World Nuclear Association 2014). In this review a brief historical outline of the most important discoveries and a summary of principles of radioactivity and radioactivity detection are given. Diagnostic and therapeutic application of radiopharmaceuticals, their production and their tissue-specific targeting methods are also discussed along with an introduction of state-of-the-art diagnostic modalities and a summary of further requirements and future perspectives. Key WoRdS nuclear medicine radiopharmaceutical diagnosis therapy radioactivity Submitted Febr 11, 2015; Accepted Oct 31, 2015 *Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected] #This review is dedicated to the 70th birthday of Géza Tóth.