NRCan awards $25.4 million for further medical isotope development work

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) will provide $21.45 million over four years in follow-on funding to three research facilities to produce technetium-99m (Tc-99m), the most widely used isotope for medical imaging responsible for 80% of nuclear medicine diagnostic procedures. The awards are part of a $25-million funding envelope with the remainder ($3.55 million) used to cover the government's expenses for implementing and managing the program.

The organizations that were successful in being refunded are: the Univ of Alberta ($7 million) which operates an experimental cyclotron at the Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton; TRIUMF ($7 million) for its cyclotron at the Univ of British Columbia; and, the Prairie Isotope Production Enterprise (PIPE) electron linear accelerator in Winnipeg ($7.46 million).

The funding flows through NRCan's Isotope Technology Acceleration Program which is a successor to the department's Isotope Supply Contribution Agreement (ISCA) which originally provided $35 million over two years to four projects to conduct initial R&D and demonstration of their respective non-reactor based technologies (R$, January 31/11).

Each project is a multi-sector collaboration of academic, public and private sector partners with a mandate to seek additional private sector partners to "help ensure that isotope production is reliable and on a sound commercial footing".

The intent is to establish a distributed supply chain of Tc-99m to replace the reactor-based isotopes currently being generated by AECL at its Chalk River Laboratories when it is phased out by 2016.

The fourth project to receive ISCA funding was a particle accelerator Medical Isotope Project situated at the Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon. It recently received its commissioning licence to begin testing the facility with partners from the National Research Council and medical researchers in Ottawa, Toronto and Winnipeg.

R$