Bücher der Reihe Developments in Nuclear Medicine

This publication contains a collection of 22 manuscripts by authors invited to write review articles. They are based on lectures presented on the First and Second Training Course in Radiopharmacy and Radiopharmacology. These courses were organized under the auspices of the "Joint Committee on Radiopharmaceuticals" of both European Societies of Nuclear Medicine (ENMS and SNME) and were sponsored by the European Society of Nuclear Medicine (ENMS). Recent developments in radiopharmacy and radiopharmacology have been very complex; they cannot be overlooked by the medical staff in nuclear medical departments. This book has been written to provide access to recent research and to practical daily routine in patients' investigations. It provides a wide-ranging and topical overview of radiopharmacology in­ cluding chapters on basic chemistry and physics, incorporation dosimetry, interference of drugs in radiopharmacokinetics, legal aspects and stable isotope-labelled pharmaceuticals. Style of presentation is not uniform. Par­ tial overlapping concerning the content of papers has not been avoided in order to ensure different views and aspects of the same subject. We hope that the interdisciplinary approach will be stimulating and thought-provok­ ing for the reader. Consequently, this book is designed for specialists work­ ing in nuclear medical centres which involve different disciplines such as pharmacists, radiochemists, physicists, biochemists, biologists, mathemati­ cians, electronic engineers, physicians with different specialities, and tech­ nicians.

The contents of this volume are based upon presentations made to the Second European Symposium on Radiopharmacy and Radiopharmaceuticals which was held in St. Catharine's College Cambridge in March 1985.

Although the clinical importance of hypoxia imaging is obviously great, to date neither the clinical nor the scientific community at an international level has focused many research activities on the hypoxia problem.

"More than half of the world's population is at risk of the tropical diseases malaria, leprosy, schistosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, Chagas' disease, African trypanosomiasis and leishmaniasis and half a billion are infected with at least one of these diseases".

In the past nuclear medicine has tended to develop in cycles governed by the development of new radiopharmaceuticals followed or preceded by advances in instrumentation.

The book shows the fields in which PET offers new and unique information for the development of drugs (conception, toxicity, pharmacokinetics and metabolism, clinical research, and relations between clinical and biological effects) and evaluates fields in which PET may shorten the development time of drugs.

Parameters such as membrane transport, metabolism and protein incorporation govern the fate of amino acids in living tissue.

It was at Frankfurt/Mainin 1899 that Paul Ehrlich first expounded his famous "site-chain theory" -which described the basic immunological principal of antibody-antigen interactio- on the occasion of the opening of the Institute for Experimental Therapeutics (which was later named after him).

During the past decade Positron Emission Tomography (PET) has turned from a highly sophisticated tool developed for basic research in neurology and cardiology into an advanced nuclear medicine imaging technique ready for routine use.