Evaluation of 99mTc-labeled antibiotics for infection detection

One of the fields of research in nuclear medicine is the development of new radiopharmaceuticals for imaging infection and inflammation in humans. For this development, several antimicrobial peptides, antibiotics, antibiotic peptide and chemotactic peptides, etc., have been radiolabeled with different radionuclides (67Ga, 99mTc, 111In, 18F, 131I, etc.) and their imaging potentials studied. Actually, it is very important to distinguish between infection and inflammation. In this respect, radiolabeled antibiotics have advantages because many of the properties of the ideal infection-specific agent through antibiotics localizes in infection site. In this review, only 99mTc-labeled antibiotics are evaluated and discussed. © 2010 The Japanese Society of Nuclear Medicine.