Speaker
Description
South Africa has a proud history of radionuclide production dating back to the 1960s. Since those pioneering years, several improvements and additions have been made to the accelerator infrastructure in the country to exploit this advantage. In recent years an isotope, astatine-211, has emerged as a promising candidate for α-particle therapy of cancers. As a result of this interest, 211At has been identified as one of the radionuclides for development. iThemba LABS is one of about 30 cyclotrons in the world that have the beam characteristics required to produce this isotope. Despite the potential advantages of 211At for targeted α-particle therapy, its application for this purpose is constrained by its limited availability. The most commonly used production method is via the 209Bi(α,2n)211At reaction which utilises bismuth as the target and straightforward cyclotron irradiation methodology. The most significant impediment to the availability of 211At availability is the need for an accelerator capable of generating ≥28 MeV α-particles with sufficient beam intensities to make clinically significant levels of 211At. To this end the biggest challenge faced thus far at iThemba LABS has been extracting enough beam intensity out of the injector cyclotron. With this contribution we will report on the preliminary results of the development to produce α-beam. This discussion will focus on challenges with beam transmission, target development and chemistry.
