Small Peptide and Protein-based Molecular Probes for Imaging Neurological Diseases

Neurologic disorders are prevalent diseases in the population and represent a major cause of death and disability. Despite the advances made during recent decades, the early diagnosis of these diseases remains a challenge. Determining the pathophysiology of such disorders is also challenging and is a requirement for the development of new drugs and treatments. Molecular neuroimaging studies can help fill these gaps in knowledge by providing clinicians with the tools necessary to diagnose and monitor treatment response and by providing data to help researchers understand the mechanisms of disease. Molecular imaging is a fast-growing field of research, and the development of imaging probes is crucial to molecular imaging research. Imaging based on peptide and small protein molecular probes provides many advantages over traditional neuroimaging for the identification of many pathological aspects of nervous diseases, especially gliomas, for which this type of imaging is gradually being moved to clinical settings. Nonetheless, peptide and small protein imaging also has potential applications in other neurologic diseases such as stroke, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. This review is focused on the main peptide and small protein probes used for molecular imaging in neurologic disease.