The Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford (MIPS) is an interdisciplinary research program founded in 2003 within the School of Medicine and directed by Drs. Sanjiv Sam Gambhir and Christopher Contag. The Program is integrally linked with the Bio-X Program in interdisciplinary biosciences (http://biox.stanford.edu/) and bnngs together scientists from the Schools of Engineering, Medicine, and Humanities &Sciences at Stanford. MIPS has a radiopharmaceutical facility, a small animal imaging facility (http://sci3.stanford.edu/), and clinical imaging equipment in the Department of Radiology including computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography combined with CT (PET/CT), and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). The Division of Nuclear Medicine (http://nuclearmedicine.stanford.edu/) is also actively linked to MIPS. In addition to the nearby existing chemistry/radiochemistry resources located within the Clark, Lucas, and Edwards buildings, a GE PETtrace (16.5 MeV) cyclotron was moved into the Radiochemistry Core Facility (RCF) in April 2004. In August 2005, MIPS opened the doors to the RCF and began setting up and validating all the new instruments and equipment including the cyclotron. The cyclotron routinely provides [ [18] F]fluoride (fluorine-18: ti/2 = 109,8 min), f ?F]fluorine gas (fluorine-18: tv2 = 109.8 min), [^^Cjcarbon dioxide (carbon-11: ti/2 = 20.4 min), and f ^Njammonia (nitrogen-13: ti/2 = 9.97 min) to meet most of the current PET radiochemistry needs in MIPS. Although our cyclotron can produce oxygen-15 (ti/2 = 2.04 min), routine production does not occur due to the long distance between the facility and the PET scanners, lndium-111 (ti/2 = 2.8 d) and yttrium- 90 (ti/2 = 64 h) are purchased directly from Perkin-Elmer. Gallium-68 (ti/2 = 68 min) is milked from our Ge-68/Ga-68 generator that was purchased from Cyclotron Instruments (Mainz, Germany). Lutetium-177 is acquired from the University of Missouri Research Reactor Center (see Letter of Support from Cathy Cutler at the end of this section). We currently obtain copper-64 (ti/2= 12.8 h), yttrium-86 (ti/2= 14.6 h), and zirconium-89 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (see Letter of Support from R. Jerome Nickles), and iodine-124 (ti/2= 4.2 day) from RITVERC GmbH (Moscow, Russia). We are exploring possibilities of installing solid targets and associated processing apparatuses for in-house production of these radioisotopes.
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