The preclinical study of predicting radiosensitivity in human nasopharyngeal carcinoma xenografts by 18F-ML-10 animal- PET/CT imaging

Previous studies have reported that the radiosensitivity is associated with apoptosis. Hereby, we aimed to investigate the value of (18)F-ML-10 PET/CT, which selectively targeted cells undergoing apoptosis, in predicting radiosensitivity of human nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) xenografts. We used CNE1 (highly differentiated) and CNE2 (poorly differentiated) NPC cell lines to construct tumor models, which had very different radiosensitivities. After irradiation, the volumes of CNE2 tumors decreased significantly while those of CNE1 tumors increased. In (18)F-ML-10 imaging, the values of tumor/muscle (T/M) between CNE1 and CNE2 mice were statistically different at both 24 h and 48 h after irradiation. Besides, ΔT/M(1-0) and ΔT/M(2-0) of CNE2 mice were higher than those of CNE1 mice, demonstrating obvious discrepancy. Furthermore, we observed obvious changes of radioactive distribution in CNE2 group. On the contrary, T/M of (18)F-FDG in irradiation group revealed no obvious change in both CNE1 and CNE2 groups. In conclusion, (18)F-ML-10 animal PET/CT showed its potential to predict radiosensitivity in NPC.