Therapeutic efficacy of heterogeneously distributed radiolabelled peptides: Influence of radionuclide choice

Potential of Nuclear Imaging Techniques to Study the Oral Delivery of Peptides

Peptides are small biomolecules known to stimulate or inhibit important functions in the human body. The clinical use of peptides by oral delivery, however, is very limited due to their sensitive structure and physiological barriers present in the gastrointestinal tract. These barriers can be overcome with chemical and mechanical approaches protease inhibitors, permeation enhancers, and polymeric encapsulation. Studying the success of these approaches pre-clinically with imaging techniques such as fluorescence imaging (IVIS) and optical microscopy is difficult due to the lack of in-depth penetration. In comparison, nuclear imaging provides a better platform to observe the gastrointestinal transit and quantitative distribution of radiolabeled peptides. This review provides a brief background on the oral delivery of peptides and states examples from the literature on how nuclear imaging can help to observe and analyze the gastrointestinal transit of oral peptides. The review connects the fields of peptide delivery and nuclear medicine in an interdisciplinary way to potentially overcome the challenges faced during the study of oral peptide formulations.

Radionuclides for Targeted Therapy: Physical Properties

A search in PubMed revealed that 72 radionuclides have been considered for molecular or functional targeted radionuclide therapy. As radionuclide therapies increase in number and variations, it is important to understand the role of the radionuclide and the various characteristics that can render it either useful or useless. This review focuses on the physical characteristics of radionuclides that are relevant for radionuclide therapy, such as linear energy transfer, relative biological effectiveness, range, half-life, imaging properties, and radiation protection considerations. All these properties vary considerably between radionuclides and can be optimised for specific targets. Properties that are advantageous for some applications can sometimes be drawbacks for others; for instance, radionuclides that enable easy imaging can introduce more radiation protection concerns than others. Similarly, a long radiation range is beneficial in targets with heterogeneous uptake, but it also increases the radiation dose to tissues surrounding the target, and, hence, a shorter range is likely more beneficial with homogeneous uptake. While one cannot select a collection of characteristics as each radionuclide comes with an unchangeable set, all the 72 radionuclides investigated for therapy—and many more that have not yet been investigated—provide numerous sets to choose between.