61

 

A Flexible and Economical Automated Nucleophilic [¹⁸F] Fluorination Synthesis System for Positron Emission Tomography Radiopharmaceuticals--PETNet Pharmaceutical Services, Inc., 810 Innovation Drive, Knoxville, TN  37932; 423-218-2542

Dr. Henry C. Padgett, Principal Investigator

Mr. Hank Chilton, Business Official

DOE Grant No. DE-FG02-00ER83067

Amount:  $100,000

 

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a proven technology for the non-invasive assessment of various biochemical processes in living humans.  The continued success of PET as a reliable and cost-effective clinical tool for the diagnosis of human disorders depends upon the further development of economical and versatile automated synthesizers for the routine production of radiopharmaceuticals.  The goal of this project is to design and produce a relatively simple, flexible, user-friendly and economical remote automated synthesis system based on the concept of unit operations.  This system will serve as a bridge between manual production methods for new compounds and high-volume single product synthesis modules.  The primary technical objective of the Phase I effort will be to design, construct, and functional test a prototype manual remote synthesis system based on the unit operations approach.  The validation of this general purpose system will be its configuration and initial use for the preparation of the PET radiopharmaceuticals [¹⁸F]FLT, [¹⁸F]FHBG, and [¹⁸F]FHPG using nucleophilic [¹⁸F]fluoride ion.

 

Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the applicant:  A simple, flexible, user-friendly, and cost-effective automated synthesis module that can provide routine production of radiopharmaceuticals from [¹⁸F]fluoride ion would offer a significant commercial advantage in the area of PET instrumentation.  This module will be inexpensive and will be able to be configured for a particular synthetic method to produce a fluorine-18 labeled radiotracer.  It will also be able to be reconfigured for other radiotracer syntheses, and will allow the research community to have access to this technology without having to build their own manual systems or to invest in an expensive dedicated or inflexible commercially available system.