Radiopharmaceutical Chemistry: Developments and Breaks
A special issue of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049). This special issue belongs to the section "Medicinal Chemistry".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2026 | Viewed by 3072
Editor
2. Department of Chemistry and Biosciences, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark
Interests: radiochemistry; radiopharmacy; GMP-production; drug degradation; receptor kinetics; analytical methods; chelation; medicinal chemistry
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
We are celebrating Molecules’ 30th anniversary in 2026, and it has been some journey from the first publication back in 1996. The area of Radiopharmaceutical Chemistry has, like Molecules, been on a breath-taking journey over the last 30 years, coming from relatively few institutions conducting groundbreaking research and becoming much bigger, with thousands of chemists working mainly at university hospitals all over the world. This expansion is driven by university hospitals producing radiopharmaceuticals for human clinical use, but many radiochemists still find the time to perform very interesting research, resulting in many and very diverse research papers being published.
Organic chemistry, peptide chemistry and metal organic chemistry are involved when new radioactive tracers are produced. When working with radiochemistry, you must protect the product, because we make sterile medicines, but you also have to protect the staff from radioactive radiation. In addition, you have to work very quickly due to the isotopes' very short half-life and the work must be very controlled because we produce pharmaceuticals. This means that we use synthesis machines to do the syntheses for us. There are also chemists in our field who are interested in writing synthesis programs and/or the mechanics of the synthesizer.
The amount of isotopes used today have increased significantly from a handful of isotopes that were used for diagnosis to quite a lot more that are used today not only for diagnosis but also for treatment, when targeting and treating cancer especially.
When producing a radiopharmaceutical, it is important that it targets the diseased tissue (for example, the tumor or the infection) or that the radioactively labeled tracer can be used to examine the functionality of an organ, for example, by looking at the energy metabolism or the blood circulation of an organ, so that a lot of human biochemistry is involved in developing, optimizing and understanding the fate of a radioactive drug. To understand what is going on, it can be good to model it. The input function is the radioactivity in the blood, and the secretion is often through the urine; hence, to model the radiopharmaceutical, one needs to examine the radioactivity content and the degree of metabolism in the blood.
Developing a new radiopharmaceutical requires both early-stage animal research and applied research; the early stage requires setting up animal models and the later stage is more for getting a radiopharmaceutical ready for clinical trials. Thus, there are both people working with animal models and people working in the regulatory area in the field of radiochemistry. Many chemists have been involved in designing these nuclear medicine centers such that they comply with the regulatory rules for the manufacture of radiopharmaceuticals.
When producing a radiopharmaceutical, one probably needs to purify it; this is done, for example, by using Sep-Pak technology or semipreparative HPLC, before the radiopharmaceutical is formulated prior to being administered. When you have the finished product mixture, you must perform quality control before releasing the radiopharmaceutical, which is often done by radio-TLC, Radio-HPLC, pH, endotoxin and sterility measurements but could also include other analytical equipment like, for example, a GC or even a HPLC-MS; hence, there is also a number of analytical chemists in our field.
Research is ongoing in all of the above-mentioned areas and probably many others too. This Special Issue on Radiopharmaceutical Chemistry, welcomes research papers and reviews from all the above areas. We hope to receive your submissions so that this Special Issue can contribute to showing all aspects of the diverse and interesting area of radiochemistry.
Submitted articles may be research papers, communications, or review articles.
Dr. Svend Borup Jensen
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- radiopharmaceutical chemistry
- organic, peptide, analytical and metal organic radiochemistry
- synthesis machines/synthesizer
- radioactive labeling
- isotopes
- human biochemistry
- metabolism/metabolites
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