From the June 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Unfortunately for countries in the Western Hemisphere, Mo-99 has a half-life of about 66 hours, and Tc-99m has a half-life of only six hours – rendering Australia’s supply of diminished use to the Americas. According to Atcher, roughly 25 percent of the isotope would be lost during that 24-hour transit.

Leon Zebrick, director of molecular imaging at Ochsner Health System in the U.S., says he and his colleagues have long understood the perils of depending on third parties for radiopharmaceuticals. Previous shortages of other isotopes informed their decision to invest in their own cyclotron. With it, they will not only be able to produce a variety of PET isotopes, they could potentially generate Tc-99m as well.


“The U.S. government and the researchers they’re funding have hung their hat on solution A, but the Canadian government has hung its hat on solution B,” says Zebrick, referring to linear accelerator based methods versus cyclotron methods, respectively.

In Canada, a program called the Non-reactor- based Isotope Supply Contribution Program (NISP) was created to fund and encourage participation in the market, and several companies are trying to fill the void that will be left by Chalk River. Advanced Cyclotron Systems, the company that will manufacture the cyclotron at Ochsner, is one of them.

“On a cyclotron you bombard Mo-100, not Mo-99, with proton beams and synthesize Tc-99m from that,” says Zebrick, who contrasts that process with the linear accelerator one, which still aims to produce the parent isotope, Mo-99.

Each method has its advantages. Although manufacturing Mo-99 means a longer half life and more opportunities to take the isotope to market, “we didn’t go that route because linacs are not so good at producing workhorse PET isotopes,” says Zebrick. “We need a cyclotron, we knew that, and if we can make Tc-99m on it – all the better.”

Like NISP in Canada, the U.S. government introduced a bill in 2009 called the American Medical Isotopes Production Act with the goal of building interest in isotope production. In support of that legislation, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA) works with commercial entities to support development of new moly-99 sources.

The DOE/NNSA website states that under their cooperative agreements they split costs fifty-fifty to a maximum of $25 million per partnership. The organization also cites two companies, NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes and SHINE Medical Technologies, as currently making developmental headway with linear accelerators.

June 2015 Magazine

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