Belgravia Tech will commercialise research that creates medical isotopes in cyclotrons.
Alberta University is spinning out Belgravia Tech, a company based on research a team led by oncologist Sandy McEwan. The company will commercialise technology that allows researchers to create medical isotopes in with particle accelerators known as cyclotrons instead of nuclear reactors.
Technetium-99m is a key medical isotope that allows oncologists to detect and evaluate cancer. With a biological half-life of only one day and low radioactivity, it is safe to use in humans.
Currently, 40% of the world’s technetium-99m supply is created in Canada’s Chalk River nuclear reactor. The reactor will be shut down in 2016, and it is not financially viable to replace the reactor with a new one. Around the same time, another reactor in the Netherlands will also reach the end of its lifespan, leaving the medical world with a shortage of the key element.
McEwan’s team has now figured out how to use cyclotrons to produce the element. Ironically, it is thanks to such an accelerator, invented at the University of California, Berkeley in 1932, that technetium-99m was originally discovered in 1937.
Alberta University has constructed a new building specifically dedicated to a prototype commercial-scale cyclotron. Through a partnership with Sherbrooke University and Advanced Cyclotron Systems, an accelerator has been installed and is being tested. The intellectual property is being patented, and once Health Canada, the government public health department, has approved the mass-production of technetium-99m, Belgravia will commercialise the technology.
Sandy McEwan, currently the interim CEO of Belgravia Tech, said: “Every dose that we make has to meet international standards and individual country standards for quality and convenience. We have to show the technology is applicable in all environments, that clinicians all over the world are comfortable with our product.”