The market for lutetium-177 is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. There are many products in the clinical pipeline that use lutetium-177 as radioactive substance, and we are seeing new, up-and-coming therapies. A promising agent is lutetium-177 PSMA, which acts on the prostate-specific membrane antigen and is used in the treatment of metastasised prostate cancer. In addition to prostate carcinomas, other cancers could be treated with the isotope lutetium-177 in the future. Prof. Hendrikse of Amsterdam UMC, VUmc location, foresees expanding possibilities for patient treatment despite some issues related to market availability.
Medical isotope offers great perspective for the effective treatment of various cancer indications with limited side effects
During the Targeted Radiopharmaceuticals Summit, James Nagarajah gave a presentation. In his presentation he spoke about the challenges that can be faced during the development of a new radio pharmaceutical, and how these can be overcome by collaborating with suppliers, industry partners and medical institutes.
For the past few months, pharmacist Jeske Hendriksen has been working as a PhD student in the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek hospital, where she is conducting research into radioactive cisplatin in the CISSPECT project. In this project, she is working alongside technical physician Else Aalbersberg, who has been at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek for 8 years and involved in the CISSPECT project since the start.
Thanks to intensive collaboration between Curium and NRG, a complex project has been brought to a successful conclusion: the development and installation of a production process for the medical isotope Xenon-133.
FIELD-LAB is the incubator for new nuclear medicines. Together with partners FIELD-LAB develops new nuclear medicine for personalised treatment of cancer patients.
Despite many innovative developments in nuclear medicine, bringing the nuclear end product to the physician and thus the patient, remains a long-term and (therefore) often frustrating mission. Hopefully, this will not be the case any longer, according to physicist dr. Mark Konijnenberg of the department Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Erasmus MC in Rotterdam.
Every day, 30.000 patients benefit from medical isotopes from Petten. The NRG reactor, where the medical isotopes are irradiated, changed its fuel to low-enriched uranium in 2006.
As Prof. Dr. James Nagarajah, assistant professor Nuclear Medicine at Radboud University in Nijmegen addressed during his talk PSMA Guided Theranostics in Prostate Cancer at NRG at February 1, 2019, the future of prostate cancer (PCa) may be rather exciting.
The plans for FIELD-LAB in Petten are really starting to take shape and there are lots of people who can't wait to contribute to this special initiative.