Research Article Synthesis, 68Ga-Radiolabeling, and Preliminary In Vivo Assessment of a Depsipeptide-Derived Compound as a Potential PET/CT Infection Imaging Agent

Copyright © 2015 Botshelo B. Mokaleng et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Noninvasive imaging is a powerful tool for early diagnosis and monitoring of various disease processes, such as infections. An alarming shortage of infection-selective radiopharmaceuticals exists for overcoming the diagnostic limitations with unspecific tracers such as 67/68Ga-citrate or 18F-FDG. We report here TBIA101, an antimicrobial peptide derivative that was conjugated to DOTA and radiolabeled with 68Ga for a subsequent in vitro assessment and in vivo infection imaging using Escherichia coli-bearing mice by targeting bacterial lipopolysaccharides with PET/CT. Following DOTA-conjugation, the compound was verified for it