Theranostics 2019, Vol. 9, Issue 2 554 Ivyspring International Publisher Theranostics 2019; 9(2): 554-572. doi: 10.7150/thno.27213 Research Paper Evaluation of [11C]NMS-E973 as a PET tracer for in vivo visualisation of HSP90 Koen Vermeulen1*, Evelyne Naus2*, Muneer Ahamed3, Bala Attili1, Maxime Siemons1, 2, Kaat Luyten1, 2, Sofie Celen1, Joost Schymkowitz2, Frederic Rousseau2, Guy Bormans1 1. Laboratory for Radiopharmaceutical Research, Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium 2. Switch Laboratory, VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium 3. College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University, Bedford Park, South Australia, Australia *These authors contributed equally to this manuscript Corresponding author: Dr. Guy Bormans. Email:
[email protected] © Ivyspring International Publisher. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY-NC) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). See http://ivyspring.com/terms for full terms and conditions. Received: 2018.05.11; Accepted: 2018.11.30; Published: 2019.01.01 Abstract Heat shock protein 90 is an ATP-dependent molecular chaperone important for folding, maturation and clearance of aberrantly expressed proteins and is abundantly expressed (1-2% of all proteins) in the cytosol of all normal cells. In some tumour cells, however, strong expression of HSP90 is also observed on the cell membrane and in the extracellular matrix and the affinity of tumoural HSP90 for ATP domain inhibitors was reported to increase over 100-fold compared to that of HSP90 in normal cells. Here, we explore [11C]NMS-E973 as a PET tracer for in vivo visualisation of HSP90 and as a potential tool for in vivo quantification of occupancy of HSP90 inhibitors.