Method to Development of PET Radiopharmaceutical for Cancer Imaging

The increasing number of different novel positron emission tomography (PET) radiopharmaceuticals poses challenges for their manufacturing procedures at different PET research facilities. Recent commercially available radiochemistry units with disposable cassettes are becoming common stations to produce radiopharmaceuticals with high specifications to understand the critical PET imaging outputs of the study. Therefore, several radiochemists across the PET research centers develop and optimize their own radiochemistry protocols to develop a novel or routine radiopharmaceutical at their lab. In this report, we describe the general procedure and steps followed to develop a (clinical-grade) radiopharmaceutical on a commercially available radiochemistry unit, TRASIS AIO. As an example, we use our routine protocol followed for the production of [¹¹C]acetate, a fatty acid metabolic PET imaging ligand for several cancer imaging studies.