CLINICAL RELEVANCE OF RADIOIMMUNOIMAGING IN MALIGNANT DISEASES

First results of tumor imaging using radiolabelled antibodies date bac k to 1953. During the last 40 years an improvement of this diagnostic procedure was achieved by the use of monoclonal antibodies and new lab elling techniques for short-lived isotopes. Up to now, three groups of patients take advantage of immunoimaging, namely patients with colore ctal cancer, ovarian cancer, and malignant melanoma. In patients with recidivation of colorectal carcinoma the accuracy of radioimmunodetect ion (RID) is approximately 90%. The same holds true for patients with ovarian cancer; in these cases RID may decrease the frequency of secon d-look operations. RID has proved to be most useful in malignant melan omas, as its accuracy for lymph node and transit metastases is between 85 and 90%. However, in other malignancies - especially breast and lu ng cancer - RID did not yield similarly good results. An improvement o f RID may be achieved by the use of bifunctional or recombinant antibo dies.