Radiochemistry and radiopharmaceuticals

Abstract

Following last year's precedent this section of Annual Reports will review not only recent progress in radiochemistry, including isotope production and environmental aspects, but also in the production of radiopharmaceuticals and their use in nuclear medicine for imaging. Radiation chemistry (unless related to the stability of labelled molecules), the use of nuclear activation analysis and the inorganic chemistry of elements that are by their nature, radioactive are all excluded. HighlightsThe IAEA published 1 the results of a wide ranging review of nuclear measurements. Conferences held during 2005 which covered progress in radiochemistry, included the '4th all Polish Conference on Radiochemistry and Nuclear Chemistry' 2 and the '7th Nuclear and Radiochemistry Symposium' 3 whilst a more focused meeting dealt with the production and application of labelled compounds 4 in the oil industry. A couple of very interesting articles appeared during 2005 questioning what exactly is meant by many fundamental 'radiochemical' concepts 5 such as 'specific activity' and 'carrier-free' and indeed how the specific activities 6 of 'no-carrier-added' materials can be determined. The Proceedings of the 16th Symposium on Radiopharmaceutical Chemistry 7 covers advances made in radiopharmaceutical development and applications while the Proceedings of the Society of Nuclear Medicine 8 and the European Society of Nuclear Medicine 9 cover both radiopharmaceutical development and the application in diagnosis and therapy. A critical review has been published 10 on the application of positron emitting nuclides for use as radiopharmaceuticals.

Ligand exchange and complex formation kinetics studied by NMR exemplified on fac-[(CO)3M(H2O)]+ (M=Mn, Tc, Re)

“…Tricarbonyl complexes of Tc I and Re I are interesting precursors for radiopharmaceuticals because the three water ligands can readily be replaced by incoming ligands and a large number of compounds have been synthesized and characterized [18,20,21,23,24,29]. Both M I centres bind a variety of ligand atoms like nitrogen, phosphorous, oxygen and sulfur.…”

“…Synthesis and characterization of radiolabelled compounds for imaging and therapy has strongly expanded over the last decade [15][16][17][18][19]. An important isotope for radioactive imaging agents is 99m Tc and there is a strong interest in the development of new labelling techniques using this short-lived isotope.…”