Regional pharmacokinetics of orally administered PET tracers

Positron emission tomography (PET) is currently the most useful imaging technique for noninvasive measurement of drug pharmacokinetics regionally in a variety of tissues. Over the past decade, PET measurements have provided many critical insights about the tissue distribution of several classes of drugs; neuroleptics, antimicrobials, antineoplastics, etc. PET measurements can be performed after any route of drug administration, intravenous, inhalation or oral, however, intravenously administered drugs have been the most extensively evaluated. Studies of orally administered drugs are clearly of great interest; however, formulation issues have precluded widespread applications in these areas. In this report, we discuss the unique problems associated with studying orally administered drugs and review the results of recent studies performed in our laboratory.