This project will leverage the unique facilities and combined strengths of an ongoing trilateral collaboration between scientists at three institutions to address two critical needs. The first is the need for increased availability of high purity and high specific activity radionuclides for medical applications such as disease diagnosis, treatment, and response monitoring. This need will be addressed by the development of 72Se/72As production at a scale sufficient to support research and clinical applications of the diagnostic imaging radionuclide 72As. Additionally, the need for an ensured and enhanced nuclear science workforce will be addressed through the training of the next generation of highly qualified nuclear scientists and radiochemists.
Radionuclides are widely used in nuclear medicine and represent powerful tools in delivering precision medicine through imaging and therapy procedures. This is achieved by incorporating the radionuclide into a drug formulation called a radiopharmaceutical that targets a particular disease or illness. The 72As radioisotope can serve as a potential imaging and dosimetry surrogate for its radiotherapy counterpart, the 77As radioisotope. This is referred to as the theranostic approach. The nuclear properties of arsenic, particularly the longer half-life, enable its use with peptides and proteins, which the typical shorter half-life radionuclides do not. This project will focus on the scale-up of nuclear reactions on robust target materials intended to produce high quantities of 72Se for preparing 72Se/72As generators. The availability of an efficient 72Se/72As generator (“cow”) would make this radionuclide available “on demand” at locations remote from the production site, since 72As could be continually separated (“milked”) from the 72Se containing matrix. The hydrophilic radioarsenic chelating system to be optimized through these efforts will facilitate the incorporation and use of arsenic radioisotopes in the research and clinical communities, particularly for radiopharmaceutical development. Additionally, training of the next generation of nuclear scientists and radiochemists will provide personnel for the future workforce, allowing further advances in these important areas of research to be made.
