Nuclear medicine is returning to its origin by studying more and more metabolic signals using new positron or single-photon-emitting radiopharmaceuticals. The history of nuclear medicine over the past 50 years highlights the strong link between investments in chemistry and the development of radionuclides and radiolabeled compounds. In fact, one can trace the major advances in nuclear medicine directly to research in chemistry. These advances have had a major impact on the practice of health care. According to the Society of Nuclear Medicine, 20 million nuclear medicine procedures using radiopharmaceuticals and imaging instruments are carried out in hospitals in the United States alone each year to diagnose disease and to deliver targeted treatments. These techniques have also been adopted by basic and clinical scientists in different fields (infection, immunology, gastroenterology, cardiology, oncology, neurology, psychiatry, and others) for diagnosis as well as for scientific tools. Many groups of research are now developing radiopharmaceuticals as biomarkers for new drug targets to facilitate the entry of their new drugs into the practice of health care and to objectively examine drug efficacy at a particular target relative to clinical outcome. This has created a demand for new radiopharmaceuticals and a corresponding need for scientists who are trained to develop them. We are interested in articles that describe the development and use of new radiopharmaceuticals for SPECT and PET studies, for diagnosis and treatment purposes. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Development of new radiopharmaceuticals for PET and SPECT studies
• New radiopharmaceuticals for evaluation of autoimmune disease
• Use of radiopharmaceuticals for inflammation/infection diagnosis
• New role of nuclear medicine in oncology
• Trends in radioguided surgery
• New radiopharmaceuticals for therapy
• New radiopharmaceuticals for PET and SPECT imaging of neurodegenerative diseases
• New radiopharmaceuticals for PET and SPECT imaging of cardiovascular diseases

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