Nuclear waste stored in Britain will help to cure cancer patients after a breakthrough by scientists.
It raises the prospect of a home-grown supply for the NHS of materials it has to import at present for use in radiotherapy and imaging.
A team working at the National Nuclear Laboratory has developed a production process for a radioactive material called Lead-212. This can be used in a promising cancer treatment called targeted alpha therapy, which destroys cancer cells while minimising damage to healthy tissue.
The therapy has been hard to introduce because the necessary radioisotopes are “either quite difficult to make, or they’ve got a very short half-life,” Nick Hanigan, director of health and nuclear medicine at the laboratory, said.
A radioisotope is an unstable form of a chemical element that releases radiation as it breaks down. A half-life is the amount of time that a radioactive isotope takes to decay down to half the original amount in the sample.
Those used in targeted alpha therapy must not decay too quickly — meaning they would not last long enough between production and use in patients — nor too slowly, leaving a radioactive dose in the patient’s body for too long.
Hanigan said Lead-212 hit the sweet spot, and his team in Preston were working “to scale the production route in order to remove the significant supply constraints”.
“We have probably invested about £350,000 to £500,000 so far — we are investing about £3.5 million,” he said. “So we are ramping up our involvement quite significantly.”
They have proved they can extract small quantities of Lead-212 from nuclear waste “to the right quality”. They are now looking to create a generator “like a water filter that you get in your kitchen”, where material goes in at the top and the isotope comes out at the bottom.
There is only a finite supply of nuclear waste, however, and the team are also looking at whether they can produce a sustainable supply of materials via other means.
Hanigan said the project was his “swansong” before retirement. Having watched relatives go through cancer chemotherapy, he hopes that increased use of the therapy may offer a gentler option. A doctor at St Thomas’s hospital told him the therapy had been a “medical miracle” for one patient who was “riddled with cancer — and it just cleared it up”.
The breakthrough represents only a single aspect of the nuclear laboratory’s work on medical radioisotopes, he added.
Dr Paul Howarth, the nuclear laboratory’s chief executive, said: “Fifty years ago, the UK led the world in medical radioisotope research and production, yet today we rely on imports often from ageing facilities. Establishing a sovereign home-grown supply of these important medical radioisotopes would be transformative for healthcare in the UK and, given the global nature of the supply challenge, citizens of the other countries we supply.”
Dr Jane Sosabowski at Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, said the initiative was “immensely exciting, offering a huge boost to the future of molecular radiotherapy treatment and personalised medicine in the UK”.
Professor Johann De Bono, professor of experimental medicine at the Institute of Cancer Research, said that targeted alpha therapy had “huge potential for treating a range of cancers”, adding: “To trial and use these treatments, we are reliant on the supply of radioisotopes so new sources may be needed, if that supply is affected by the war in Ukraine.”
