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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Nucl. Eng.
Sec. Nuclear Materials
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fnuen.2024.1379996
This article is part of the Research Topic Women in Nuclear Engineering Research View all 15 articles

Concept validation of separations for thorium-based radionuclide generator systems for medical application

Provisionally accepted
Bianca Schacherl Bianca Schacherl 1*Kiara Maurer Kiara Maurer 1Martin Schäfer Martin Schäfer 2Yvonne Remde Yvonne Remde 2Frank Geyer Frank Geyer 3Annika Fried Annika Fried 3Steffen A. Happel Steffen A. Happel 4Martina Benešová-Schäfer Martina Benešová-Schäfer 5
  • 1 Institute for Nuclear Waste Disposal (INE), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany
  • 2 Service Unit for Radiopharmaceuticals and Preclinical Trials, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
  • 3 Institute for Nuclear Waste Disposal, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
  • 4 TrisKem International, Bruz, France
  • 5 Research Group Molecular Biology of Systemic Radiotherapy, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Targeted alpha therapy (TαT) represents an emerging and cutting-edge treatment option for patients dealing with highly challenging metastatic cancer diseases. Critically, the limited supply of alpha particle-emitting radionuclides, so-called alpha in vivo nanogenerators, hampers wider utilization of TαT in the clinical setting. This could effectively be circumvented by alternate production routes including straightforward purification and reformulation strategies. Radionuclide generators offer an immense potential in this regard in case simple and robust elution strategies can be provided still adhering to the high radioisotopic, radionuclidic, and radiochemical purity criteria.In this study, a first step towards novel separation strategies providing additional sources of alpha in vivo nanogenerators for TαT was taken by experiments with various metal surrogates. With different systems, 232 Th/ nat Ba was used as a radionuclide generator analogue to 227 Th/ 223 Ra and 232 Th/ nat Ba/ nat La as a triplet analogue to 229 Th / 225 Ra/ 225 Ac. For the 232 Th/ nat Ba system, three selective resins (UTEVA, TEVA, DGA-N) were evaluated. Two perturbations of the best-performing resin were further evaluated using a larger diameter column and a week of equilibration time. For the 232 Th/ nat Ba/ nat La separation system, a combined column with two selective resins (TK200, TK101) was employed and evaluated. In conclusion, the obtained results pave the way towards the establishment and implementation of alternative separation strategies in the radioactive proof-of-concept validation in the near future. 1 𝐴𝑐 89 227 (𝛽 -) 𝑇ℎ (𝛼) 𝑅𝑎 88 223 90 227

    Keywords: targeted alpha therapy, alpha in vivo nanogenerators, Thorium, Radium, Radionuclide Generators, Radionuclide separation

    Received: 31 Jan 2024; Accepted: 20 Jun 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Schacherl, Maurer, Schäfer, Remde, Geyer, Fried, Happel and Benešová-Schäfer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Bianca Schacherl, Institute for Nuclear Waste Disposal (INE), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

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