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Updated: May 3, 2026

Preparing a 68Ga-labeled Arginine Glycine Aspartate RGD-peptide for Angiogenesis
Published on: January 7, 2019
Evaluation of synovial angiogenesis in patients with rheumatoid arthritis using ⁶⁸Ga-PRGD2 PET/CT: a prospective
Zhaohui Zhu1, Yufeng Yin, Kun Zheng
1Department of Nuclear Medicine, Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, , Beijing, China.
Background:
The study aimed to evaluate the use of positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) with (68)Ga-PRGD2 as the tracer for imaging of synovial angiogenesis in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA).
Methods:
Twenty untreated active patients with RA underwent (68)Ga-PRGD2 PET/CT and (18)F-FDG PET/CT before treatment; two patients with osteoarthritis served as controls. Among the 20 patients with RA, 12 repeated the evaluations after 3-month treatment. The image findings were correlated with core variables of disease activity, including the clinical disease activity index (cDAI).
Results:
Our findings demonstrated that (68)Ga-PRGD2 specifically accumulated in the synovia with active inflammation rich in neovasculature with high-level αvβ3-integrin expression, but not in the (18)F-FDG-avid inflammatory lymph nodes. In patients with intense (18)F-FDG uptake in muscles caused by arthritic pain, we observed that (68)Ga-PRGD2 PET/CT was better able to evaluate disease severity than (18)F-FDG PET/CT. Both (68)Ga-PRGD2 accumulation and (18)F-FDG uptake changed in response to therapeutic intervention, whereas the changes of (68)Ga-PRGD2, not (18)F-FDG, significantly correlated with clinical measures of changes in the form of cDAI.
Conclusions:
This is the first integrin imaging study conducted in patients with RA that preliminarily indicates the effectiveness of the novel method for evaluating synovial angiogenesis.
Clinical Trial Registration:
This study has been registered online at NIH ClinicalTrial.gov (NCT01940926).
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