Speaker
Description
The MEDICIS (Medical Isotopes Collected from ISOLDE) facility is a new and unique facility located at CERN (Switzerland) dedicated to the production of non-conventional radionuclides for research and development in imaging, diagnostics and radiation therapy, with very high specific activity. CERN-MEDICIS has been commissioned in September 2017 and delivered its first radionuclides in December 2017. Since then, the facility is shipping novel radioisotopes for medical research to hospitals and scientific institutes in Switzerland and across Europe.
Since its commissioning, the CERN-MEDICIS facility has shown the feasibility of providing radionuclides such as Tb-155, Er-169 and Yb-175 for innovative medical research. For that purpose, the facility used either the proton beams from ISOLDE, a CERN nuclear physics facility, or sources provided by external institutes being part of the MEDICIS collaboration. In the first case, the 1.4 GeV proton beams delivered by the CERN Proton-Synchrotron Booster impinge on a target usually made of tantalum or uranium-carbide in which spallation reactions occur. In the second case,which is currently the case during LS2, targets are irradiated either with protons in a cyclotron or with neutrons in a nuclear reactor. In both cases the radionuclide of interest is produced in the irradiated target which is transferred to the MEDICIS facility. The target is heated up to high temperatures (up to 2000◦C) to allow for the diffusion and effusion of the atoms out of the target and subsequently ionized. The ions are accelerated and sent through an off-line mass separator. The radionuclide of interest is extracted through mass separation and implanted on a thin metallic foil. After collection, the batch is measured by gamma-spectrometry and prepared to be dispatched to a research center.
This presentation will give an overview of the facility during 2019 and its perspectives.
