Investigation of tumor metastatic potential with N-[18F]fluoroacetyl-D-glucosamine

In order to investigate the metastatic potential of tumors in vivo by measuring hyaluronic acid metabolism, C57BL/6 mice with B16 melanoma variants and C3H/He mice with FM3A tumor variants were evaluated using N-[18F]fluoroacetyl-D-glucosamine (18F-GlcNFAc). The uptake of 18F-GlcNFAc was slightly higher (P less than 0.05) in B16-F10 tumors (high metastatic potential) than in B16-F1 (low metastatic potential). Analysis of metabolites showed that acid-insoluble fraction was the largest one in the liver by 60 min, whereas in the tumors, phosphates fraction was the major metabolite. Slower metabolism in tumors was suggested, and it may be one of the reasons for the difficulty of detecting the characteristics of their hyaluronic acid synthesis. 18F-GlcNFAc uptake by FM3A variants showed no significant correlation with their metastatic potential. In addition, N-acetyl-D-[1-14C]glucosamine, 2-deoxy-D-[1-14C]glucose and [6-3H]thymidine failed to demonstrate any difference between tumors' metastatic variants in vivo.