Applications of small animal PET

The small animal PET is an innovative preclinical imaging technique that is meant to visualise biological processes of tissues in a living organism. The most important characteristic is the very high spatial resolution that makes those tomographs suitable for imaging small animals like mice. The employment of different radiolabelled compounds allows to highlight the overexpression or nonexpression of many metabolic pathways, helping to profile in vivo the cancer from a biological point of view, to predict or measure the response to experimental therapies, to observe the metabolic modification of the cancer over time, and to test new labelled compound to be eventually used for clinical PET. Main drawback is the very high cost of the scanners and the need of a radiopharmacy, partly cyclotron based, to synthesise as many PET tracers as possible.