Design of a Universal Dissolution System for Solid Cyclotron Targets

Cyclotron radionuclides production based upon solid targets irradiations have become increasingly significant in recent years, due to an always growing demand for radiometals, such as 68Ga, 89Zr, 43/47Sc, 52/54Mn. This request has dived the focus on solid targets management, where the first fundamental step of the radiochemical processing procedure is the target dissolution, currently generally performed with home-made modules separated from the next purification/radiolabeling modules. The aim of the present work was therefore to integrate the dissolution and purification step on automatic commercial cassette-based synthesis modules, for a complete target processing and radiopharmaceutical synthesis performed in a single module. This work was performed in the framework of the ongoing METRICS project (Multimodal pET/mRI imaging with Cyclotron-produced 51/52Mn iSotopes) in collaboration with the Sacro Cuore Don Calabria Hospital Radiopharmacy, within LARAMED (LAboratory of RAdioisotopes for MEDicine) research program running at LNL-INFN