Global News – Metro Vancouver company makes advance in medical isotope technology
A Vancouver-area company has developed new technology to make it possible for hospital-based and other medical cyclotrons to produce Technetium-99, a key isotope for health care.
Cyclotron-based gallium-68 generator breaks production records
26 Nov 2019 Tami Freeman Gallium-68 (68Ga) is a positron emitter that’s becoming established as a valuable diagnostic isotope, primarily for detection of neuroendocrine tumours (NETs). Such tumours do not metabolize glucose well – precluding their visualization via standard FDG-PET scans – but overexpress somatostatin receptors that bind, for example, to the PET agent 68Ga-Dotatate. […]
Competition heats up to produce medical radioisotope
15 Nov 2019 David Kramer Two North American companies hope their novel production processes for technetium-99m give them a leg up in an increasingly crowded market. The global supply chain for the world’s most-used radioisotope, the medical imaging tracer technetium-99m, is notoriously unreliable. When one or more of the handful of reactors producing 99mTc’s parent isotope, molybdenum-99, […]
Researchers at the BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver and TRIUMF, the Canadian national particle and nuclear physics lab, have successfully produced vital supplies of Technetium-99m, a medical imaging isotope, using a retrofitted cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator already in place in hospitals. Using this technology, metropolitan areas could combat the increasing shortage of Tc-99m, […]
A Canadian-led team says that it has succeeded in proving the feasibility of using particle accelerators instead of nuclear reactors to produce a badly needed medical isotope. If health regulators approve the method, it will place supplies of the crucial material on a far more secure footing. “We have found a practical, simple solution,” François […]
The first commercial shipment of medical isotopes produced using a new particle-accelerator-based technique has been made by scientists at the Canadian Light Source (CLS). Molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) decays to create technetium-99m (Tc-99m), which is used to tag radiopharmaceuticals and plays a unique and vital role in medical imaging. Unlike nuclear reactors, which currently make most of […]