Development and in-vivo evaluation of a novel delivery system for radiopharmaceuticals

This thesis is divided into a general introduction and three separate chapters that can be read independently. The general introduction is discussing the nuclear medicine application based radiopharmaceuticals and the incorporation of nano technology science as delivery vehicles with radiopharmaceutical design yielding radiopharmaceutical particulates. The first chapter is touching the development and characterization of iron oxide and silver nanoparticles as drug delivery vehicles. The second one is addressing the radiolabeling and quality control testings of iron oxide and silver nano particulate platforms. The third one is describing the in vivo evaluation of the two prepared nano-sized radiopharmaceuticals in normal and solid tumor bearing mice. This is followed a complete reference list that is compiled in the end, immediately after the three chapters. Radionuclides play an important role in nuclear medicine. When they are properly harnessed, these have valuable emission properties that can be used for diagnostic imaging techniques, such as single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT, e.g. ⁶⁷Ga, ^99mTc, ¹¹¹In) and positron emission tomography (PET, e.g. ⁶⁸Ga, ⁶⁴Cu, ⁸⁹Zr), as well as therapeutic applications (e.g. ⁴⁷Sc, ¹⁷⁷Lu, ⁹⁰Y, ²²⁵Ac,). A fundamental critical component of a radiopharmaceutical is the ligand that binds the radionuclide so that, it can be properly directed to a desirable molecular target in-vivo. Hence, there is an urgent need to achieve efficacious and safe delivery of the radionuclide to the target organ with minimal non-specific uptake by healthy tissues. This can be achieved by the incorporation of nanoparticles (N Ps) as delivery vehicles with radiopharmaceuticals design generating what is called radiolabeled N Ps or nano-sized radiopharmaceuticals. The radiolabeling of N Ps can be performed with or without slight modifications to the original N P surface. It can be performed through three main pathways (i) direct radiolabeling II) chelator-mediated radiolabeling III) encapsulation method.