Karolinska  Institutet
Nobels väg 5
17177
Stockholm
Sweden

 www. ki.se

Participant's Lead

Prof. Christer Halldin Director of KI PET center  Phone: +46 8 517 726 78  Fax: +46 8 517 717 53  Contact

Institute Presentation

The PET-center at Karolinska Institutet is a section of the Department of Clinical Neuroscience. It is a key participant in the Stockholm Brain Institute (SBI) of cognitive neuroscience and serves as a base resource for Psychiatry R&D in the Stockholm region. The center and the two leaders (LF and CH) have been particularly successful in the development of new radioligands for imaging of brain neurotransmission systems. Of all suitable radioligands in the world for this purpose, at least one third have been originally developed here. The list includes widely used ligands such as [11C]raclopride, [11C]SCH23390 and [11C]flumazenil. Following the first quantitative study of receptor binding in the human brain in vivo (1986) the center examined the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia and pioneered the use of receptor occupancy to confirm mood of action of CNS-drugs (antipsychotics) and as a tool in drug development. The center has over the years collaborated with at least 20 pharmaceutical companies, of which AstraZeneca currently is a major player. At a behavioural  level, KI was first  to demonstrate a relationship between brain biochemistry and higher brain functions. More recently KI has advanced the image analysis methodology by validating the use of wavelets to obtain parametric images of receptor binding