Future Development of Radiopharmaceuticals

The approach to developing pharmaceutical, as well as radiopharmaceuticals, has expanded over the years. The first approach involved the extraction of natural products followed by testing for pharmacologic effect of the extracts. In the 20th century, the dominant appproach was the enhancement of the pharmacologic effect by synthetic alterations of extracted substances and the use of structure-activity correlations. More recently, molecular biology techniques have been used to better define the binding sites and, as a result, to design more efficacious drugs. The opportunity to develop radiopharmaceutical that measure a specific biochemical pathway has never been greater because of these many advances in medicinal chemistry.