## 2 CERN-MEDICIS Facility  
The ISOLDE facility has been located at the external beam of the CERN's PSB since 1991. It operates two electromagnetic mass spectrometers in a sequential mode, one delivering a beam for physics experiments, while the other primes. A regular operating year lasts for 30 weeks, seeing about 50% of CERN's 1.4 GeV protons. ISOLDE started operating the post-accelerating High Intensity and Energy (HIE)-ISOLDE Linac about 10 years ago to extend the physics program towards nuclear structure investigations by Coulomb excitation and transfer reaction studies. On the target station side, a new Class A work sector for handling open radiological sources was built in 2004. Presently, a major upgrade of the facility, which will upgrade the post-accelerating Linac with superconducting accelerating cavities, is ongoing; in parallel, a design study for the beam quality improvement and for an upgrade in proton beam intensity and energy is also being performed. The new facility for the start-up in 2014 following the CERN-wide Long Shut-Down 1 can be seen in Figure 1.  
The long shutdown period (January 2013 to July 2014) provides an opportune time window to upgrade the existing ISOLDE facility with some HIE-ISOLDE infrastructure and the extension of Building 179, which will host CERN-MEDICIS radiological Class A laboratory for biomedical research, as well as ISOLDE's target storage area. These new structures will also host mechanical and chemical laboratory equipment and the fundamental elements for CERN-MEDICIS's operation. This includes:A rail conveyor system (RCS) based on an industrial system, modified to bring the CERN-MEDICIS sample from the ISOLDE irradiation area to a shielded decay area. Once there, a robot acquired from the KUKA company (Augsburg, Germany) completes the target transport cycle. A heavy concrete hot-cell, for target preparation, and a bunker equipped with a mass separator, provided by the Katholieke Universiteit (KU) Leuven, for radioactive isotope mass separation. CERN-MEDICIS will produce radioactive isotopes by recovering the proton beam before it reaches the beam dump, using different types of targets behind the ISOLDE targets; CERN-MEDICIS will form a symbiotic relationship with ISOLDE, taking advantage of the latter's unique ability, and experience to provide exotic carrier-free isotopes, while remaining transparent to its operation. In addition, the project will benefit from CERN's nanostructured target patent to efficiently extract the isotopes with an offline mass separator before the chemical purification step [1]. Since advanced medical applications rely on the use of specific isotopes, CERN-MEDICIS's target material is crucial for achieving significant production. During its initial stage in 2016, only low atomic number Z materials, such as titanium foils and Y\({}_{2}\)O\({}_{3}\) ceramics, will be used; from these, we will produce batches of several hundreds of megabecqurels of \({}^{44,47}\)Sc and \({}^{61,64}\)Cu (Tables 1 and 2). In the second stage, tentatively in 2017, we will use targets from the nuclei of higher atomic numbers, such as tantalum foils, reaching some of the most interesting terbium and lanthanide isotopes; in a final phase in 2018, we foresee the use of uranium carbide to reach an even wider range of isotopes and most of the other alpha-emitters. The preliminary planning for the construction of the facility and its start-up following a staged scheme is shown in Table 3.  
As ISOLDE receives about 50% of all CERN protons, and from these, about 85% traverse the ISOLDE target without any interaction, using a CERN-MEDICIS target not only adds value to this lost beam, but also takes advantage of the fact that a large part of its characteristics remain intact. The optimal distance between the CERN-MEDICIS sample and ISOLDE target was defined as 400 mm.