Molecular Imaging of Brain Tumours Using Single Domain Antibodies

Abstract

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most malignant type of brain neoplasm with an average patient survival of 15 months under the current treatment regime. The failure of therapeutic approaches including surgical resections is due to multiple factors, including molecular diversity of GBMs, invading micro-metastases, presence of tumor stem cells, molecular drug resistance, as well as difficulties of delivering therapeutics across the vascular brain-tumor barrier. Non-invasive imaging of molecular make-up of GBM could facilitate the identification of critical disease features and tailoring of treatments to individual disease variants, respectively. Development of such molecular imaging agents requires integration of tumor biomarker discovery with the development of biomarker-targeting molecular imaging agents, and their validation in pre-clinical disease models. This chapter will describe processes and techniques involved in the pre-clinical development of molecular imaging agents for brain tumors, with the particular emphasis on workflows leading from biomarker selection to developing single-domain antibody-targeted imaging probes to visualize and evaluate biomarker expression by in vivo imaging using various imaging modalities.