Mankoff David A, Link Jeanne M, Linden Hannah M, Sundararajan Lavanya, Krohn Kenneth A
Division of Nuclear Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA.
J Nucl Med. 2008 Jun;49 Suppl 2:149S-63S. doi: 10.2967/jnumed.107.045963.
Tumor receptors play an important role in carcinogenesis and tumor growth and have been some of the earliest targets for tumor-specific therapy, for example, the estrogen receptor in breast cancer. Knowledge of receptor expression is key for therapy directed at tumor receptors and traditionally has been obtained by assay of biopsy material. Tumor receptor imaging offers complementary information that includes evaluation of the entire tumor burden and characterization of the heterogeneity of tumor receptor expression. The nature of the ligand-receptor interaction poses a challenge for imaging--notably, the requirement for a low molecular concentration of the imaging probe to avoid saturating the receptor and increasing the background because of nonspecific uptake. For this reason, much of the work to date in tumor receptor imaging has been done with radionuclide probes. In this overview of tumor receptor imaging, aspects of receptor biochemistry and biology that underlie tumor receptor imaging are reviewed, with the estrogen-estrogen receptor system in breast cancer as an illustrative example. Examples of progress in radionuclide receptor imaging for 3 receptor systems--steroid receptors, somatostatin receptors, and growth factor receptors-are highlighted, and recent investigations of receptor imaging with other molecular imaging modalities are reviewed.
肿瘤受体在肿瘤发生和肿瘤生长过程中发挥着重要作用，并且一直是肿瘤特异性治疗的一些最早靶点，例如乳腺癌中的雌激素受体。了解受体表达情况是针对肿瘤受体进行治疗的关键，传统上是通过对活检材料进行检测来获取相关信息的。肿瘤受体成像可提供补充信息，包括对整个肿瘤负荷的评估以及肿瘤受体表达异质性的特征描述。配体 - 受体相互作用的性质给成像带来了挑战——特别是成像探针需要低分子浓度，以避免使受体饱和并因非特异性摄取而增加背景信号。因此，迄今为止肿瘤受体成像的大部分工作都是使用放射性核素探针完成的。在这篇肿瘤受体成像综述中，将以乳腺癌中的雌激素 - 雌激素受体系统为例，对作为肿瘤受体成像基础的受体生物化学和生物学方面进行综述。重点介绍了三种受体系统（类固醇受体、生长抑素受体和生长因子受体）在放射性核素受体成像方面取得的进展实例，并对近期使用其他分子成像方式进行受体成像的研究进行了综述。
