Animal models for the evaluation of radiopharmaceuticals

As the nuclear medicine community strives to make the promise of personalised medicine a reality, it is more essential than ever to have highly relevant translational models to recapitulate human disease. Indeed, personalized medicine aims to identify the predictive factors of a disease at the patient level and animal models can be an essential element if they meet certain key criteria.
In addition of choosing the right animal model, the evaluation of potential new radiopharmaceuticals requires consideration of animal model-specific differences (in terms of target expression and distribution, physiology, pharmacokinetics…) that may predict differences between preclinical and clinical observations, as well as the design of imaging or therapy protocols that are representative of clinical protocols.
This teaching session will therefore, be an opportunity to discuss the optimisation of preclinical approaches in experimentations, data interpretation and reporting with the aim of improving the translational power of new radiopharmaceutical candidates.