Global Shortage of Medical Radiopharmaceuticals

Literally thousands of hospital and outpatients in the United States and other parts of the globe will be missing out on important medical diagnostic testing due to a severe shortage of radioactive tracers, commonly known as radiopharmaceuticals, according to Robert Atcher, current president of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, the U.S. professional oversite organization composed of Nuclear Medicine technologists, physicians and physicists.

The shortage has occurred as the result of the shutdown of three of the world’s six facilities that make radioisotopes. The reactors, or cyclotrons, located in France and Belgium have closed for scheduled maintenance, while one of the most important, the reactor in The Netherlands, unexpectedly shut down a couple of weeks ago after a problem in its cooling system was detected. This Dutch reactor supplies nearly half of the USA’s supply of Mo-99. It isn’t expected to reopen for production until sometime in late October or early November of this year. When a similar problem occured last year at Canada’s site, over 50,000 patient exams were affected, even delaying important treatment of cancers left undetected.

The most common radiotracer used for diagnostic imaging is the aforementioned Molybdenum-99. It is the parent product of a material known as Technetium-99m, a relatively stable radiotracer used in nearly all Nuclear Medicine (Molecular Imaging) procedure. The product is ideal for this purpose because of its relative low energy, short half-life (the amount of time it takes for the product to decay by half), and its chemical valence that makes it perfect as a blood-tagging isotope.

Nearly 20 million Nuclear Medicine “scans” are performed annually in the U.S. alone and more than half of those use this product. It chemically bonds very well with a host of non-radioactive products such as diphosphonates for bone imaging, colloids for liver and spleen pictures and cholecystokinin for gallbladder scans, just to name a few. It is also idea untagged. When injected into the blood stream Technetium-99m is useful for imaging the thyroid gland, looking at the lining of the bowel for outpouching known as Meckel’s Disease and many more kinds of imaging techniques.