ABSTRACT
Molecularly targeted affinity ligands derived from screens play an important role in furthering our understanding of human disease in pharmaceutical discovery and development, for nanotechnology sensing applications, systems biology, and the design of molecular imaging agents. As with all potentially revolutionary ideas, the development of molecular imaging probes has faced several significant hurdles. The discovery of imaging agents is a complex multidisciplinary effort. It requires an infrastructure of experts from research fields as diverse as genomics, proteomics, chemical biology, engineering, image computation, and clinical trial design. Modern day drug discovery efforts are leading the way in exploiting molecular and biological information gathered through the sequencing of the human genome and the flood of knowledge about aberrant pathways to develop novel targeted medicine. Advances in molecular biology and the understanding of diseases at the molecular level has allowed insight into optimal targets for drug intervention and, importantly, imaging agents.
