Posted on 12/27/2020 10:41:46 PM PST by nickcarraway
A team at the Canada’s particle accelerator facility at the University of British Columbia is celebrating a major triumph, inking a deal to produce a rare cancer drug that previously relied on nuclear waste.
The TRIUMF project has formed a partnership with Ontario-based Fusion Pharmaceuticals to upgrade its facility to produce actinium-225, nicknamed “the rarest drug on Earth.”
That rare radioisotope started making headlines about five years ago when four treatments of it were administered to a German man who was just weeks from death, and suffering from multiple cancerous tumours.
Eight months later, the tumours had disappeared.
“We’re seeing cancer basically be eliminated in some cases, so those are very early results but very exciting ones,” TRIUMF Innovations CEO Kathryn Hayashi told Global News, of the isotope’s potential.
But actinium-225 is very rare. Until now, the global supply of the material has come from U.S. radioactive waste.
In 2015, Paul Schaffer, one of TRIUMF’s associate lab directors, realized the institution was producing significant amounts of actinium-225 through the regular use of its high-energy cyclotron facility for research.
“The cyclotron speeds up protons to three-quarters of the speed of light using electromagnets. So it basically shoots it down a beam line and hits a beamline,” explained Hayashi.
“It basically blasts it apart and creates hundreds of different isotopes, and one of them is actinium-225.”
Hayashi says the facility theoretically has the capacity to scale up to produce thousands of doses of the drug.
That’s particularly exciting, because actinium has in early research been shown to be effective at killing cancer cells, while leaving healthy parts of the human body unaffected.
“It’s very hard to develop resistance with actinium,” explained Dr. Francis Bernard, vice president of research at BC Cancer.
“So we anticipate that this will be an effective third fourth line treatment, in addition to the other treatments available.”
The first step for TRIUMF will be to develop a supply chain.
Step two will involve rolling out clinical trials in British Columbia, potentially within the next 18 months.
“It’s sort of like sending a man to the moon or a woman to the moon,” said Bernard.
“You know how to get there, you just need to develop resources.”
Bookmark.
UBC is going to be richer than the dreams of avarice.
How about vibranium?
Rush Limbaugh should look into this treatment.
Great news if it can be scaled up and made available
Cool stuff, but how expensive is this stuff? Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory once had a huge (for it’s time) particle accelerator used for particle physics experiments, but when they could spare some beam time, they did experimental treatments for cancer patients, mostly heavy ion radiotherapy, but lots of really cutting edge stuff for the time. No hospital could have afforded such a machine at the time so the treatment was essentially priceless.
It has a half life of 9 days . Needless to say it is intensely radioactive. It actually decays to Francium which has a half life of 22 minutes!
Too extensively metastasized, unfortunately.
B
actinium-225, shortly followed by oscarinium 66.
The cost of this therapy?..........crickets.
It will only be available to soros-types.
It should be free according to liberals...
And you think it should be free.
B.C. particle accelerator scores triumph with deal to produce ‘rarest drug on earth’
I had no idea they had particle accelerators before Christ.
Thank you. I’ll be here all week.
Actinium-225 is a radionuclide with a 9.9 day half-life (so it cannot be stored for very long before alpha-decaying away). The trick is to chemically attach Ac-225 to some specific compound that is readily absorbed by a specific type of cancerous tumor.
An alpha particle has a short (cellular dimensions) range so it mainly destroys the nearby cancer cells and not much healthy tissue outside of the tumor.
The advantage of Ac-225 is that its daughter products also decay by alpha emission with very short halflives. Basically for every Ac-225 that can be put into the tumor, there are five alpha particles emitted to destroy the cancer cells.
It’s like using machine guns to get rid of the enemy, rather than just single-shot rifles.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.