PET technology in CNS drug development

Central nervous system disease is a disease that seriously damages human physical and mental health. Its complexity, multi-factors, and multi-gene regulation and other characteristics have led to the unclear pathogenesis of related diseases. The development of CNS drugs is very important. Significance. The blood-brain barrier is a general term for the three barriers of “blood-brain”, “blood-cerebrospinal fluid” and “cerebrospinal fluid-brain”. For people with CNS diseases, this barrier prevents the passage of drugs and is not conducive to the treatment of diseases. Therefore, how to effectively evaluate the transport efficiency of drugs or drug delivery systems across the blood-brain barrier is a challenge for CNS drug development. Methods such as optical imaging, pharmacokinetic testing, or pharmacodynamic research can be used to investigate the delivery of drugs or drug carriers in the brain. Today, let’s take a brief look at PET technology.

Molecular imaging can solve key problems in the development of new drugs. For example, in pharmacokinetics research, as long as small molecule compounds, peptides, proteins, antibodies, cells, etc. are labeled with nuclide, it is equivalent to loading ” GPS” and then use PET/SPECT molecular imaging technology to observe the distribution of drug molecules in the living body at a glance. In terms of anti-tumor drug development, CNS drug development and new drug development for cardiovascular diseases, molecular imaging technology has obvious advantages and unique values, and is a powerful tool to improve the efficiency of new drug development and the success rate of clinical trials. Currently the most commonly used molecular imaging techniques include positron emission tomography PET, single photon emission computed tomography SPECT, and MRI.

The diseases of the central nervous system are complex, and the current understanding of them is very limited. Central nervous system disease models play an important role in studying the pathogenesis of central nervous system diseases and drug screening. The Pharmacodynamics Department of Medicilon has a professional central nervous system disease evaluation model, combined with PET-CT imaging technology, which can evaluate the effectiveness and safety of central nervous system drugs and its blood-brain barrier Penetration ability is tested.

PET (Positron Emission Computer Tomography) is a metabolic, physiological, and chemical imaging technology in the 1980s, and it is currently an advanced nuclear medicine imaging device. PET molecular imaging is non-invasive and plays an important role in the diagnosis of central nervous system diseases. PET technology can be used not only for clinical disease diagnostic imaging, but also for labeling drugs to track changes in the body.

For example, in the application and research of the nervous system, brain PET imaging can reflect various physiological and biochemical processes in the brain, including blood flow, blood volume, local glucose metabolism, amino acid metabolism, protein synthesis, and the integrity of the blood-brain barrier , The density of receptors, etc. PET technology can also non-invasively provide the dynamic distribution of drugs in the body, so as to obtain the efficiency of nano-delivery of drugs into the brain, and the wavelength of PET is longer than fluorescence, which can detect focal tissues in the deep body cavity.

However, PET imaging agents are generally radionuclides with a short half-life and must be made on demand, so the current research cost is relatively high. However, as an important part of molecular imaging technology, PET imaging will play an increasingly important role in the diagnosis of central nervous system related diseases, and the development of corresponding imaging agents will also become a research hotspot.

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