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Researchers report fastest purification of astatine-211 needed for targeted cancer therapy
Astatine-211 recovery from bismuth metal using a chromatography system. Unlike bismuth, astatine-211 forms chemical bonds with ketones.
In a recent study, Texas A&M University researchers have described a new process to purify astatine-211, a promising radioactive isotope for targeted cancer treatment. Unlike other elaborate purification methods, their technique can extract astatine-211 from bismuth in minutes rather than hours, which can greatly reduce the time between production and delivery to the patient.
“Astatine-211 is currently under evaluation as a cancer therapeutic in clinical trials. But the problem is that the supply chain for this element is very limited because only a few places worldwide can make it,” said Jonathan Burns, research scientist in the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station’s Nuclear Engineering and Science Center. “Texas A&M University is one of a handful of places in the world that can make astatine-211, and we have delineated a rapid astatine-211 separation process that increases the usable quantity of this isotope for research and therapeutic purposes.”
The researchers added that this separation method will bring Texas A&M one step closer to being able to provide astatine-211 for distribution through the Department of Energy’s Isotope Program’s National Isotope Development Center as part of the University Isotope Network.
Details on the chemical reaction to purify astatine-211 are in the journal Separation and Purification Technology.
B. Weyssow
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 268-276
Technical Paper | Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics - Transport | dx.doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1126
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The classical transport theory is strictly valid for a plasma in a homogeneous and stationary magnetic field. In the '60, experiments have shown that this theory does not apply as a local theory of transport in Tokamaks. It was shown that global geometric characteristics of the confining elements have a strong influence on the transport. Three regimes of collisionality are characteristic of the neoclassical transport theory: the banana regime (the electronic diffusion coefficient increases starting from zero), the plateau regime (the diffusion coefficient is almost independent of the collisionality) and the Pfirsch-Schlüter regime (the electronic diffusion coefficient again increases with collisionality).
