Medical radionuclides production and status of the SMILES project

by Dr Arnaud, Marcel, Honoré Guertin (CNRS/IN2P3 - Nantes Université - IMT Atlantique)

Friday 19 Apr 2024, 11:00 → 13:00 Europe/Rome

C. Villi meeting room

Nuclear medicine uses radionuclides or radiopharmaceuticals to diagnose and treat cancer cells for decades. With the rise of radio ligand therapy and of the theranostic approach, there has been a renewed interest for alternative radionuclides in nuclear medicine. Most common production routes use low energy protons or neutrons. In some cases, these methods are not well suited. Currently, only few radionuclides are deployed in clinical practice. However, many others may be of medical interest due to their emitted radiation, their half-life and/or their chemical properties that can be adapted to the transit time of carrier molecule and to the pathology.
Since nuclear data measurements are essential for the optimization of the radionuclide production, the PRISMA team of the SUBATECH laboratory carried-out experiments in collaboration with the GIP ARRONAX (Nantes, France), which possesses a multi-particle high-energy cyclotron (70 MeV protons, 68 MeV alpha particles and 35 MeV deuterons). Using the stacked foils technique and the gamma-spectroscopy, we measured experimental data for a selection of radionuclides of medical interest: photon emitters (Hg-197m, Ru-97 …) and positron emitter (Sc-44g …) for diagnostic as well as electron emitters (Re-186, Tb-155, Sn-117m …) and α emitters (Th-226, Ra-233, Bi-213 …) for therapeutic applications. During the seminar, I will give the status of nuclear data collected for medical isotopes production. I will summarize the large set of experimental data, covering a wide range of target masses, collected by our team using the protons, deuterons and alpha particles delivered by the C70XP cyclotron at GIP ARRONAX. A focus will be placed on what can be done with a 70 MeV proton beam from the research point of view?

High-energy beams enlarge the scope of possible nuclear reaction for isotope production but, at the same time, there is an increase of parasitic nuclear reactions. Contaminants are a limiting factor for production. Chemical processes can eliminated non-isotopic contaminants. Production of isotopic contaminants can be controlled using highly enriched target material, choosing the adequate projectile energy and nuclear reactions, using decay time if half-lives are different. However, this is not always sufficient and mass separation can be another way to gain in purity. I will give the status of a new project named SMILES, Séparation en Masse couplée à l'Ionisation Laser pour des applications Environnementales et en Santé (Laser ionization and mass separation for environmental and health applications), that is just breaking the ground at the Laboratoire Subatech in Nantes.