Very high specific activity erbium 169Er production for potential receptor-targeted radiotherapy

First laser ions at the CERN-MEDICIS facility

“…The laser ion signal is calculated by subtracting the background from the measured ion signal required throughput and purity of collected nuclides. It concerns not only acceleratorgenerated radioisotopes, like Tb/Gd cross-contamination considered in this work, but also nuclides generated at nuclear reactors, for instance 169 Er with an isotopic 168 Er interference from the target material [13]. In this case, both isotopes will be efficiently ionized by an element-selective ionization.…”

“…The question remains if the technique, in its current form, can cope with high throughput, being necessary to provide a large-scale production of Tb radioisotopes. The use of thermal ionization only achieves a few percent for the overall separation efficiency [13], hampering the collection of a medically sufficient amount of radionuclides.…”

A Step-by-Step Guide for the Novel Radiometal Production for Medical Applications: Case Studies with 68Ga, 44Sc, 177Lu and 161Tb

“…Liquid target systems, while popular for the production of 18 F using enriched water, are also used for the production of radiometals such as 68 Ga, 64 Cu, 61 Cu, 89 Zr, 44 Sc, 86 Y, 63 Zn and 94m Tc [42,43]. They can shorten the pre-and post-irradiation target preparation steps and simplify the target transfer after irradiation [42].…”

“…At these facilities, radionuclides are produced via high-energy proton induced reactions combined with an online mass separator, known as Isotope Separation On-Line (ISOL). Alternatively, it has been considered to use external proton or neutron-irradiated targets to perform offline mass separation to enhance the possibilities of producing promising novel radionuclides with the mass separation technique [64]. The mass separation technique is based on the ionization processes such as surface, plasma or laser ionization, however, these methods are not element selective and could cause isobaric contamination in the resultant material.…”

“…Radiometals have been used extensively in clinical diagnostics over the last three decades, particularly, 99m Tc, 67 Ga and 111 In for SPECT and, more recently, 68 Ga, 89 Zr and 64 Cu for PET (Table 1). On the other hand" therapeutic radiometals in clinical use are limited to 177 Lu [8][9][10], 90 Y [11,12], 89 Sr [13,14] and 223 Ra [15,16].…”