The National Institutes of Health desires to have more economical methods to produce 18-labeled oxygen and, in particular, 18-labeled water for use in energy expenditure and body composition studies. This oxygen-18 is converted into fluorinated-18 isotopes to produce radiopharmaceuticals for medical imaging using Positron Emission Tomography (PET). The availability of the 18-labeled water feedstock is limited, costly, and with the growth in new radiopharmaceuticals, this feedstock will soon not be able to meet the demand. Thus, there is an urgent need to recycle the spent singly labeled water during cyclotron operations used to produce the radiopharmaceuticals. During a Phase I program, Reactive Innovations, LLC demonstrated a new process to recover and purify the oxygen-18 labeled water used in producing these radiopharmaceuticals. With this system, a higher conversion yield is possible for converting the singly labeled water into fluorinated-18 compounds. This helps the medical imaging profession increase the use of PET for medical diagnostics, lowers the costs for the expensive radiopharmaceuticals, and maintains a sufficient supply of radiopharmaceuticals to sustain the rapidly growing usage of PET. During the Phase II program, Reactive Innovations and its commercialization partner will develop and integrate this water recovery and purification process into existing radiopharmaceutical facilities.
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) using [F-18] fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) as well as other fluorine-18 based radiopharmaceuticals is a rapidly growing diagnostic imaging tool for assessing glucose metabolism in the heart, lungs, and brain, as well as for imaging tumors in oncology. Central to the success of PET is converting the limited supply of the expensive oxygen-18 labeled water feedstock into these fluorinated-18 compounds without discarding the spent water. Reactive Innovations, LLC has demonstrated a new economical method to process and reuse this O-18 water minimizing PET/FDG costs for patients as well as meeting the growing demand for F-18 products used in PET.
