The Department of Nuclear Medicine, RBWH, has approval, and is in the planning stage, for an expansion of our TGA licensed Radiopharmaceutical laboratory that supplies PET tracers to a number of PET facilities in Queensland. This expansion includes a new Clean Room for sterile manufacture, additional hot cells and synthesis modules.
In 2016 we added 68Ga-Dotatate and 68Ga-PSMA-HBED to FDG to the compounds we distribute to other hospitals, as well as supporting a substantial increase of the in-house demand. A number of new tracers also came online for clinical and research use, including 18F-GE-180 (neuroinflammation), 18F-GE216 (Alzheimer’s disease), nucleophilic 18F-DOPA, 68Ga-pentixafor (overexpression of CXCR4 receptors).
Our State-wide 177Lu-TATE therapy service expanded by 50%, increasing the availability of radionuclide therapy to patients suffering neuroendocrine tumours. This coupled with production of 177Lu-PSMA617 for prostate therapy should lead to a very exciting 2017.
Our Research Radiochemist, Melissa Latter (pictured), won a very prestigious Churchill Fellowship. She will be visiting overseas centres to gather expertise which will allow us to establish a premier manufacturing and training site for translational radiopharmaceutical science. We also have 4 staff starting on their TEAP journey; Soren Lummis and Dominique Scott in Radiopharmaceutical Science and Orrie Dancewicz and Shaun Patford in the DIMP program.
