Isotope shortage is limiting nuclear medicine across Europe

sea-maid submitted, created time 4 months 5 hours (www.bmj.com)

A worldwide shortage of medical isotopes used as radiotracers in molecular imaging will persist at least until the end of September, limiting European hospitals to between 20% and 40% of their usual nuclear medicine activities, the European Association of Nuclear Medicine warned this week.

Wolfram Knapp, the association’s president elect, said that with three of the five global nuclear reactors supplying medical isotopes still shut down, it is too early to determine when supplies will return to normal. But he cautioned: "The end of September is a best case scenario

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TransMolecular Presents Imaging and Pharmacokinetic Analysis of 131Iodine-TM601 at Society for Nuclear Medicine Meeting

kavin submitted, created time 6 months 3 weeks (www.businesswire.com)

TM601 is a novel synthetic peptide targeting both primary tumors and metastases and it will give us some hope in the battle against cancer. Derived from scorpion venom, TM601 binds to receptors on cancer cells but leaves healthy cells alone. When TM601 is tagged with radioactive iodine, it can deliver a tiny, targeted dose of radiation to cancer cells, killing them while leaving healthy tissue unharmed.

The potential of TM601 is so high that the FDA has granted its iodine-labeled form orphan drug status for patients with malignant gliomas

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Quantitative PET imaging finds early determination of effectiveness of cancer treatment

richard submitted, created time 1 year 2 months (interactive.snm.org)

With positron emission tomography imaging, seeing is believing: evaluating a patient's response to chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin lymphoma typically involves visual interpretation of scans of cancer tumors. Researchers have found that measuring a quantitative index -- one that reflects the reduction of metabolic activity after chemotherapy first begins -- adds accurate information about patients' responses to first-line chemotherapy, according to a study in the October issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

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Nuclear medicine approach can be first choice for excluding pulmonary embolism in young women

kitty submitted, created time 1 year 3 months (interactive.snm.org)

Young women at risk of having a pulmonary embolism -- a potential life-threatening blockage in a lung artery -- should first undergo a ventilation/perfusion lung scan rather than a CT angiogram, conclude authors in a paper published in the September Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

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