Advances in study of reporter gene imaging for monitoring gene therapy

To evaluate the efficiency of gene therapy, it is requisite to monitor localization and expression of the therapeutic gene in vivo. Monitoring expression of reporter gene using radionuclide reporter gene technique is the best method. Adenoviral vectors expressing reporter gene are constructed using gene fusion,bicistronic,double promoter or bidirectional transcriptional recombination techniques, and transferred into target cells and tissues, then injected radiolabeled reporter probes which couple to the reporter genes. The reporter genes can be imaged invasively, repeatedly, quantitatively with γ-camera,PET and SPECT. Recently,several reporter gene and reporter probe systems have been used in studies of gene therapy. The part of them has been used for clinic trials.