Molecular imaging is maturing as a scientific force in preclinical research and as a mechanism to guide imaging discoveries toward clinical practice.

When Simon Cherry, Ph.D., began working on PET as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, he recognized the gap between identifying molecular drug targets and providing real-world clinical applications.

Time is not on the side of molecular imaging researchers who hope to expand the use of the carbon-11 tracer into clinical PET practice.

Complementary methods have helped physicians at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Texas improve the success rate of surgical treatments for ectopic parathyroid adenoma.

Cardiologists impressed by the diagnostic power of PET/CT are beginning to recognize its clinical importance. In sites where the transition from PET to PET/CT has been made, rising cardiac PET imaging volumes have followed.

Outgoing Society of Nuclear Medicine president Dr. Peter Conti proposed at the organization's 2006 meeting that nuclear medicine is synonymous with molecular imaging.

CONTEXT: Building on established methods for CT virtual colonoscopy, Dr. Jamey Weichert, an associate professor of radiology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and colleagues tested a method for colonic tumor detection and characterization using PET/CT imaging.

CONTEXT: Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) is a powerful near-infrared modality that produces 3D quantitative images of fluorochrome distribution in live small animals. Bone morphogenetic protein-2 (BMP-2) has been used clinically to induce bone and cartilage formation.

CONTEXT: Interest in targeted cancer therapies has prompted a search for more specific tracers. Data presented at the 2006 Society for Molecular Imaging meeting in Hawaii in September by Dr. Ambros Beer from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, highlights the potential of F-18 galacto-RGD, a PET probe targeted at avb3 integrin, a glycoprotein associated with angiogenesis and tumor metastasis.