“The renowned journal Nature recently published several review articles showing how nuclear medicine (NM) offers a new way of treating cancer. The aim of this article is to explain how and why this discipline, which dates back to 1940, has been reborn with a new revolution in medicine, thanks in particular to theragnostic, a particular method which uses the same biological vector for both imaging diagnosis and therapy, but with different radioelements as tracer.
The unique role of biology and nuclear physics The principle of nuclear medicine is based on the substitution of a stable isotope (e.g. Iodine 127) by its radioactive isotope (e.g. Iodine 131), called a tracer, within a chemically or biologically pathology-specific molecule (e.g. a protein or an antibody), called…”