Nanosized drug delivery systems as radiopharmaceuticals

As widely known, radiopharmaceuticals are radionuclide comprising drugs. Radiopharmacy is a speciality area of pharmacy dedicated to compounding, dispensing, and performing quality control and disposal of radiopharmaceuticals. Due to the development in electronic and computer engineering technology, new imaging modalities are going into routine usage in nuclear medicine practice for molecular imaging. The crucial point is the detection of molecular targets of diseases, which is different from normal tissues, such as an increase or decrease of the number/amount of a receptor, transporter, hormone, enzyme, or formation of a new target. Recently, development of radiolabeled, specific molecular targeted probes has been investigated for diagnosis of diseases more accurately by different imaging modalities.Nowadays, utilization of nanosized, specific targeted, different drug delivery systems, like liposomes, niosomes, sphingosomes, micelles, nanoparticles, nanobubbles, nanocapsules, gold nanoparticles, microspheres, microcapsules, microbubbles, dendrimers, polymeric systems, quantum dots, superparamagnetic particles is under consideration depending on convenient properties, such as biodegradability, biocompatibility, enhanced drug encapsulation and nontoxicity. Nanosized drug delivery systems can also be used for both diagnosis and therapy of several diseases as theranostics. In the future, the improvement in these nanosized, radiopharmaceuticals will lead to specific imaging and/or therapy of diseases at earlier stages essential for effective therapy.