SEPARATION DEVICE FOR MOLECULAR ISOTOPES AT MEDICIS

Radioisotopes are widely used in medicine for diagnosis and treatment of cancer as well as other diseases. In CERN production of medical radioisotopes has started at 2017 with first radioactive beam. CERN MEDICIS produces radioactive isotopes by recovering the 1.4 GeV proton beam from ISOLDE before it reaches the beam dump using different types of targets behind the ISOLDE targets. Tb has four isotopes that are useful in the context of nuclear medicine, i.e. 149Tb, 152Tb, 155Tb and 161Tb. Radiopharmaceuticals are applied for diagnosis and treatment of certain diseases in nuclear medicine. Chemical equivalence of Tb isotopes means that Tb-labelled radiopharmaceuticals for diagnosis or therapy will have identical pharmacological properties. This is an important advantage for so-called theranostic applications, where therapy and diagnostics are combined to improve the results of the therapy.