In vitro evaluation of apoptosis with 99mTc-glucoheptonate.

Radiopharmaceuticals are useful to evaluate effectiveness of cancer treatments as well as diagnosis of diseases. (99m)Tc-Glucoheptonate has high sensitivity for imaging lung cancer tissues. In this study, the potential use of (99m)Tc-glucoheptonate for monitoring apoptosis related to chemotherapeutic agents is investigated in vitro using A549 lung cancer cell line. A decrease in (99m)Tc-glucoheptonate uptake ratio was observed depending on the level of apoptosis. (99m)Tc-glucoheptonate is found to be useful for the detection of apoptosis following treatment in A549 lung tumor cells.