Wisconsin company gets the green light to make key medical isotope

On 8 February the Food and Drug Administration announced its approval of the process NorthStar will use to separate technetium-99m from ⁹⁹Mo. A ⁹⁹Mo decay product, ^99mTc is a gamma-emitting tracer used for roughly 40 000 nuclear medical imaging procedures daily. NorthStar officials say that they expect to have the capacity to meet two-thirds of US demand for ⁹⁹Mo.

NorthStar will be the world’s first producer to manufacture ⁹⁹Mo from feedstock other than uranium. Instead, the isotope will be created when neutrons from a reactor are captured by the naturally occurring ⁹⁸Mo isotope. Once the ⁹⁹Mo is chemically recovered, the company’s RadioGenix process will chromatographically separate injectable ^99mTc from a saline solution containing the three isotopes of molybdenum.

NorthStar’s solution contains the same amount of ^99mTc found in the uranium-based product, says James Harvey, NorthStar’s executive vice president and chief scientific officer. NorthStar’s FDA approval is valid only for production at the University of Missouri’s MURR research reactor; the company must obtain separate approvals for ⁹⁹Mo produced in other reactors.

To read more please visit: http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.20180216a/full/

Source: Physics Today