Dr. Neil Vasdev of Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Neil Vasdev of Massachusetts General Hospital will be presenting

“Carbon-11 and Fluorine-18 Radiochemistry for Medical Imaging”

 on September 13, 2017 at 4:10 PM in Neville Hall, Room 003.

Abstract:

This presentation will focus on some non-traditional approaches to prepare positron emission tomography (PET) radiopharmaceuticals for medical imaging of new targets in living human subjects, and will show some of our recent advances with the short-lived isotope fluorine-18 and carbon-11 (half-lives =109.7 and 20.4 min, respectively). Lab-on-a-chip technologies that have advanced 18F-radiopharmaceuticals for human imaging studies as well as applications of hypervalent iodine (III)-based precursors to label non-activated aromatic rings with [18F]fluoride will be described. Radiochemistry methods that involve multiple steps with both 18F and 11C, as well as our efforts to carry out concise reactions that simplify the synthesis of existing radiotracers and have facilitated multi-center clinical research trials will also be presented. New methodologies including labeling carbonyl-groups via [11C]CO2 fixation that have not only led to clinical translation but also as a new radiosythetic approach to prepare “libraries” of 11C-carbonyl-labeled compounds will be presented. The intricacies  of transitioning labeled compounds to PET radiopharmaceuticals from "bench to bedside" our aspiration to work towards the ultimate, albeit impossible, goal in the field: to radiolabel virtually any compound for PET will be raised as points for discussion.