| APRIL 2003 | |
Molecular imaging briefingWhat is molecular imaging?Traditional medicine diagnoses disease based on its signs and symptoms. We apply therapy to try to modify those symptoms because we don't know the origin of the disease. It is a very empirical environment. Molecular medicine is binary. We go back to the beginning of life to understand the instructions that cause cells to become what they are-both good and bad. If cells can write code, we can write code, and we can fix code, and we can change the instructions to restore the cell or terminate it, if that is our desire. Instead of a top-down, symptoms-oriented search that operates empirically to modify the behavior of the patient, molecular medicine forces the physician to go to the very beginning of life and work our way up to the patient to identify the genetic origins of disease and fix them. -Michael Phelps, Ph.D., chair of the department of molecular and medical pharmacology, University of California, Los Angeles. Interview with Diagnostic Imaging, April 2001. Treatment will increasingly be based on molecular targets. Clinicians need some way to get that information from the patient. Now, that information is largely derived from laboratory tests of tissue samples. That approach is not practical in the broad scope of things, so we need tests that are analogous to these laboratory tests but can be done on an intact living person in a minimally invasive way. We are developing techniques that will give us information about what is going on at the molecular level without necessarily imaging the molecules themselves. -Dr. Daniel C. Sullivan, associate director for the biomedical imaging program at the National Cancer Institute. Interview with Diagnostic Imaging, April 2001. The term molecular imaging can be broadly defined as the in vivo characterization and measurement of biological processes at the cellular and molecular level. In contradistinction to "classical" diagnostic imaging, it sets forth to probe the molecular abnormalities that are the basis of disease, rather than imaging the end-effects of these molecular alterations. -Dr. Ralph Weissleder, director of the Molecular Imaging Research Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital. Radiology 2001 219:316-333. |
Table of ContentsMolecular imaging finds role in therapy assessment Research moves from bench to bedside Anti-VEGF agent pairs up with PET and MRA MR lights up Alzheimer's amyloid brain plaques Bioluminescence reveals protein-protein interactions Coregistration method images exogenous tissue PET reporter genes track T cell antitumor response Gene strategy targets angiogenic blood vessels Previous Editions |
