Speaker
Description
Targeted Radionuclide Therapy (TRT) and diagnostics are currently the most intensively developing fields of nuclear medicine as they allow the very precise imaging of tumors (or other targeted tissues), and the minimization of healthy tissue damage during medical therapy. TRT relies on the labeling of a radionuclide to a targeting vector – a biomolecule that has a high affinity to over-expressed antigens on the surface of tumor cells. It targets tumors, or other diseases, at the cellular level and increases the radiation dose delivered to the target tissue relative to the healthy tissue during therapy. However, the design and synthesis of radiopharmaceuticals suitable for TRT require a solid understanding of the stability of radionuclide complexes in vivo. Conventional methods to characterize the thermodynamic stability of complexes often rely on non-radioactive surrogates under biologically irrelevant conditions; moreover, little information on the kinetics of formation and the kinetic inertness can be drawn. Over the past two years (2017-2018) we received multiple radioactive beams to study the complexation behaviour and preference of various radiometals with the use of Perturbed Angular Correlation of γ-rays (PAC) spectroscopy.
In August 2017, our team partook in a beam of Cd-111 at ISOLDE for chelation studies with various systems and comparisons with previous results obtained with In-111 (mother isotope). Later in September we probed beams of radiolanthanides (Nd-139, La-140, Gd-147, Gd-149 and Lu-172), some of which were produced for the first time, in order to test the complexation preference, the complex structures as well as several novel chelators synthesized by our collaborators at UBC Chemistry.
Furthermore, in September of 2018 our team tested the chelation of Hg-199 with the common chelators DOTA and EDTA. Later in October, the ISOLDE team made available for the first time a beam of Sb-118 and its first PAC spectra was measured.
All of the above stated results will be presented and further possible experiments and directions will be discussed for this project.
