What are examples of radiopharmaceuticals?
In general nuclear medicine, for example, we use Technetium-99m MDP. That is a tracer that we use for looking at bone metastasise or bone turnover. It's used for a variety of reasons for looking at infection, inflammation, and for looking at cancer in the bone. It's a very common radio-tracer. We have tracers that are used for looking at cardiology, looking at myocardial profusion, for example. Some of them are like Technetium-99m Sestamibi, maybe Technetium-99m Tetrotosmin, Thallium-201 chloride. These are all tracers with the majority of their use in nuclear cardiology, although it's not exclusively for nuclear cardiology. There are other applications for every one of these. In Position Emission Tomography the most important tracer is F-18, Fluorodeoxyglucose, or in short they call it FDG. That's the one we use every day in the clinic, as they call FDG-PET. That is essentially an analog of glucose molecule and is a very important radiopharmaceutical for PET imaging, but there's a huge list of radio tracers that are available. These are just a very few that I mentioned that are some of the major ones.
