Cardiovascular drug development using radiopharmaceuticals

Radiopharmaceuticals can provide unique information for drug development also in cardiovascular applications. Radiopharmaceuticals offer possibility to study noninvasively cardiac perfusion, oxygen consumption, oxidative and substrate metabolism, myocardial efficiency of work, neural actions and receptors, vascular inflammation, and molecular processes which all are relevant to understand the effects of drugs. Using these surrogate end points, hypotheses can be tested in vivo in phase I and II clinical studies before starting large-scale clinical phase III or IV trials. In addition, these approaches may allow improved selection of drug therapy for a given patient. Modern techniques such as gene therapy technology provide numerous new potential mechanisms of action and targets for drug development. Device therapies and cell therapies are also under rapid development. Molecular imaging has great potential in evaluating these new therapies and selecting the patient populations and monitoring of the effect of therapy.