Miniaturization of PET Probe Synthesis
Creators: name: University Of California Office Of The President
Publisher: name: University of California Office of the President
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/00dmfq477
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: Positron emission tomography (PET) is a powerful and exquisitely sensitive, non-invasive, 3D imaging technology for studies of biological processes in living subjects for both medical applications and fundamental biological research. In the clinic, it is used extensively for cancer diagnosis, staging, treatment planning, and monitoring therapeutic outcome, and for the diagnosis or certain degenerative brain diseases. PET is also an important research tool for visualizing dynamic in vivo processes in fundamental biology. The widespread use of PET in research is primarily hindered by the lack of a convenient source of hundreds of known radiotracers; only a few radiotracers are commercially available. This is mostly due to the extremely high cost of the radiochemistry infrastructure and equipment and the scarcity of highly skilled personnel necessary to manufacture them. To accelerate new discoveries in both science and medicine, our primary goal is to produce an enabling technology to mobilize the large worldwide research community of biological scientists into PET research. These scientists need to be able to make diverse arrays of 18F-labeled PET probes on-demand, most likely by an automated synthesizer operated by non-specialists and using inexpensive supply of F-18 ion from the existing PET radiopharmacy network. This research proposal focuses on miniaturization of PET radiosynthesizers which is key in meeting these objectives. Micro-reactors and microfluidic systems are an emerging technology with many potential advantages. For example, the overall small size of devices can reduce the size and weight of radiation shielding materials needed. In addition, microfluidic devices have small features which can increase the reaction consistency and repeatability, improve yields and rates, reduce the consumption of precious precursors, increase the reliability of fluid handling, and realize new regimes of reaction conditions. Integrated fabrication technologies are often used for microfluidic devices, providing enormous economies of scale, and suggesting that chips can be fabricated inexpensively enough to be disposable after consumption of the on-board reagents and purification elements during the synthesis. There are enormous reliability and business advantages of this “razor blade” model. This proposal focuses on several exploratory experiments that are needed to define more concretely the design parameters of the ideal radiochemical synthesizer to select the most promising approaches among the vast array of microfluidic technology platforms and formats. We seek to develop an optimized method to dry the F-18 ion, to determine the optimum volume range, to determine the compatible materials, and to compare the different microfluidic formats. These proposed studies address many of the critical shortcomings of current synthesizers and help to better define the “engineering requirements” for the next-generation PET probe synthesizer.