[Antibody radiolabeling with technetium-99m]

Nowadays, labelled polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies are widely used for immunoscintigraphic diagnosis of different diseases. Technetium-99m is often considered to be the label of choice for radioimmunodiagnosis for reasons of cost, availability and imaging properties, in spite of its relatively short physical half-life (6.01 h). The existing labelling methods may be classified into two types: direct approaches, in which disulphide bridges within are reduced to generate endogenous sulfhydryl groups able to efficiently bind technetium due to their strong chelating capacity and indirect methods, in which an exogenous chelator is covalently attached to the protein to serve as the binding site. All these procedures have their advantages and drawbacks. There is no consensus among the authors about which of the methods is the best. The employed approach depends on the particular situation. The aim of the present work is to show an update about the available procedures for 99mTc-labelling of antibodies and its fragments.