ANN ARBOR, MI - In just over 20 years, the cyclotron at the University of Michigan Medical School has gone from being an obscure research tool to an essential part of diagnosing cancer, neurological diseases and cardiovascular disease.

And now that device is set to receive a major upgrade. The University of Michigan Board of Regents on Thursday will vote on allowing the bidding and awarding of construction contracts to move and upgrade the cyclotron.

The project includes replacing the current outdated cyclotron with a newer, more advanced model as well as moving the location from Kresge III to Medical Science I D Wing. The cyclotron will be housed in a new below-ground location that will include laboratory space.

“The cyclotron we have is no longer under any service contract. Parts are becoming increasingly difficult to get. When it breaks, we’re out of commission,” says Michael Kilbourn, Ph.D., professor of radiology and director of the PET Chemistry Section in the Division of Nuclear Medicine.

The current cyclotron was purchased in 1980 with a grant from the National Institutes of Health. The cyclotron produces radioactive tracers which can be targeted to certain parts of the body. It’s used in conjunction with a positron emission tomography, or PET, scanner in diagnosing cancer, neurological diseases and cardiovascular disease.

Nuclear medicine specialists inject a radioactive tracer into a patient. The tracer is designed to target a specific function. In current clinical tests, that function is sugar metabolism. The tracer is retained in areas with high sugar metabolism, which signals cancerous cells. It’s more effective than traditional MRI or CT scans, which cannot distinguish between cancerous cells and non-malignant abnormalities such as scar tissue.

A new cyclotron will give researchers and clinicians greater mechanical reliability, the ability to handle current clinical care and research demands and the space to accommodate anticipated growth in applications of PET. The cyclotron research program has increased four-fold since it began, with more than $4 million in research grants to the Division of Nuclear Medicine.

“This cyclotron has been our essential resource for supporting that research. It has also taken on important uses in clinical care,” says Kirk Frey, M.D., Ph.D., professor of neurology and radiology. Currently, U-M physicians perform PET scans on 10 to 12 patients a day.

The new cyclotron will be located in a below-ground 7,900 gross square foot addition to the Medical Science I building. Construction is expected to begin this winter and finish in early 2005. The $8.7 million project will be paid for with a $2 million NIH construction grant and by Medical School reserve funds.

The new space will house the cyclotron and radiochemistry laboratories where the tracers can be made and prepared for shipping to the hospital or research labs. The new location puts the laboratories closer to the U-M’s two hospitals and the Comprehensive Cancer Center. It will also be nearby the new Cardiovascular Center being built now.

The radioactive isotopes produced by the cyclotron have a short half-life, meaning they decay quickly – in this case, they last anywhere from several minutes to two hours. This means the tracers must be used soon after being produced. The short half-life is part of what makes PET preferable to other radioactive tests, where the half-life can be up to three days. In PET scans, the radiation exposure occurs primarily while the images are being scanned. In other tests, the radioactive material can remain in the body for several days after the test is finished, until it eventually decays. The risk from the level of radiation exposure used in PET scans is thus much lower.

New research in nuclear medicine is looking at determining the origins and development of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, as well as developing tests for cardiovascular diseases. Chemists are working on new tracers to target different organ functions, proteins or enzymes, with the hopes of developing the next generation of clinical diagnostic tools.

“It’s important that we be able to continue to provide the radiopharmaceuticals that are needed for routine care, as well as those that are needed to advance our understanding of diseases so that we can develop cures,” says Barry Shulkin, M.D., M.B.A., professor of radiology, acting director of the division of nuclear medicine and director of the Pediatric Nuclear Imaging Section. “The old equipment is no longer as stable and no longer as reliable and our chemists’ efforts to keep the equipment going divert them from their expertise in developing new tracers.”

Written by: Nicole Fawcett

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