Technetium (99mTc) pexiretide

Pexiretide is a dimeric RGD peptide carrying three PEG spacers, labelled with technetium-99m, that targets integrin αvβ3 — a receptor expressed on new tumour blood vessels and on many tumour cells. It was developed by Professor Wang Fan's group at Peking University's Medical Isotope Research Centre on National Natural Science Foundation grants, and China's NMPA approved it on 2 April 2026 under the trade name Jilunte, for SPECT/CT assessment of regional lymph-node metastasis in patients with suspected lung cancer.

The funder's own announcement calls it the first Class 1 innovative radiopharmaceutical developed independently in China and the world's first broad-spectrum tumour imaging agent for SPECT — a claim about the modality, not the molecule: PET agents dominate general tumour imaging, while SPECT has been confined to bone, thyroid and perfusion work for decades. That distinction is the commercial point. China's installed base of SPECT/CT scanners is roughly two to three times its PET/CT base (Securities Times, citing industry estimates), and a SPECT scan costs a fraction of a PET scan, so a broad tumour agent that runs on the cheaper machine reaches district hospitals that will never own a cyclotron.

The registrational claim reported in Chinese coverage is that in phase 3 there was no statistically significant difference from 18F-FDG PET/CT in telling benign from malignant lung lesions, while for lung cancer lymph-node metastasis the specificity and accuracy of 99mTc-3PRGD2 SPECT/CT were significantly higher than PET/CT's. The trial report itself is not public in English; the closest peer-reviewed evidence is a prospective head-to-head study in 26 patients with primary malignant lung tumours (Korean Journal of Radiology, 2023), which compared the two scans across 42 metastatic and 136 benign lymph-node stations with histopathology as the reference.

Commercially the agent sits with Ridio (Foshan), a company founded in 2012 out of the Peking University group, whose controlling shareholder is Beijing Jilunte Pharmaceutical; Baiyang Pharmaceutical invested in 2022 and holds the mainland commercialisation rights. An earlier filing was withdrawn in February 2025 and resubmitted before this approval.