One of the limitations for medical physics at the moment,
is that it has to fit in between the existing nuclear physics schedule.
And this only allows these isotopes to be produced for a maximum of 2 weeks,
or maybe 10 days a year.
MEDICIS will allow these isotopes to be available throughout the course of the year
and this should allow more systematic scientific studies to be possible with these particular isotopes.
From biomedical applications to nuclear astrophysics,
using a complex infrastructure and cutting edge experiments,
the men and women of ISOLDE push forward our understanding of the universe.
These are the medical applications of ISOLDE.
The applications and impact that science research has on people's lives is years in the future.
But at ISOLDE the work being done with medical researchers is making a difference today.
So for medical physics ISOLDE can produce beams
which are at the moment of potential interest to the medical physics community.
There are many facilities around the world that can produce radioisotopes.
There are accelerators and reactors
and also in some of the hospitals they produce their own isotopes for pet imaging for example.
But ISOLDE has a range of beams available
and isotopes which nobody else can provide
and these can be studied by the medical physics community
as an alternative to the existing and standard isotopes,
because in the future hospitals may be able to produce these themselves,
but at the moment they cant
and this is a way to get the first foot on the rung of the ladder
to be able to adapt these isotopes for nuclear medicine.
Radioactive isotopes are vital for today's medical diagnosis and treatment.
Radiotherapy can be used to treat some medical conditions,
especially cancer,
and isotopes are even used for sterilising equipment.
There are many facilities around the world that can produce radioisotopes for medical applications
but it's really not enough.
At MEDICIS we will have the capability
since it's going to be a dedicated facility just for this,
we'll have the capability of producing for research
some isotopes that are needed for specific applications.
MEDICIS is a powerful new facility that produces radioisotopes for medical applications
and it relies on the 50 years of expertise of ISOLDE's equipment and researchers to do it's job.
When we say it will be working as a parasitic experiment
what it means is that we'll place a second target after the ISOLDE target.
The beam goes through the ISOLDE target without losing any properties
then it just travels to the second target,
which is the MEDICIS one.
We just basically use a proton beam that otherwise would have been wasted in the beam dump.
Getting isotopes from the ISOLDE laboratory where they're created,
to hospitals where they can be used for treatment is a tricky process.
It's made harder as radioactive isotopes decay quite quickly
and sometimes in just a matter of hours lose their effect and become useless.
Well of course its always quite disappointing when the experiment doesn't quite work.
There are may things that can go wrong.
ISOLDE is a very large and complicated facility
even when you get the right beams
you can still have unexpected occurrences happening
and then the activity you've produced maybe all night long just decays away.
And this is very heartbreaking.
ISOLDE is able to produce so many isotopes
that they can ask doctors what they need directly.
Are the isotopes they currently work with the best?
Could they use something with a shorter life time?
Or that emits a different type of radiation?
ISOLDE can help doctors to research and trial new isotopes
that might make for better treatments and diagnosis,
but the facility has found it difficult to get doctors to pay attention to these benefits.
The first stage is usually to ask the medical community what sort of isotope they would like.
Around the world of course there are commercially available isotopes
but these are not usually the most favourable in terms of biology
or even effectiveness for nuclear medicine.
Given carte blanche doctors would often choose a different type of isotope
Either cleaner, or more effective, or shorter half life,
so that it doesn't hang around in a subject's body for too long.
So the great advantage of ISOLDE is that it produces basically all of the radioactive isotopes imaginable already.
So we can produce them in fairly small quantities at the moment
but still enough to start scientific programs with
these desired isotopes.
So the first stage once we've got the agreement from the doctors of what isotope they would like,
is that the activity is implanted into something fairly straight forward.
At the moment this means usually something like a zinc foil on a gold substrate.
Zinc is very easily dissolved and can be adapted for many chemical uses afterwards.
So after this process is done
the activity is then cleaned up in a chemical process
where the pure activity which is desired,
so this is the single isotope in question is extracted,
and then is made available for biochemical studies,
where it is then attached to standard antibodies
which are known to target tumours inside a body.
The activity is combined in these antibodies,
injected into the subject and then allowed to attach in a biochemical way to the subject in question.
And then from there we can either start looking at the diagnostic,
in terms of imaging processes or therapy, to see the effect of this activity on the tumour itself.
It's quite a lengthy process because unfortunately you can't just swallow an isotope.
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