All right.
My name is Nigel Lockyer. I grew up in southern Ontario, went to high school in Hamilton, and attended York University in Toronto. I did my graduate and post-graduate work in the U.S. I was a professor of physics for 22 years at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm a particle physicist by training, with a strong interest in accelerator physics and medical physics. I am the director of TRIUMF and a professor of physics at UBC.
TRIUMF has a mission statement, and it's just one paragraph:
TRIUMF is Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics. It is owned and operated as a joint venture by a consortium of Canadian universities via a contribution through the National Research Council Canada with building capital funds provided by the government of British Columbia. Its mission is: To make discoveries that address the most compelling questions in particle physics, nuclear physics, nuclear medicine, and material science; To act as Canada's steward for the advancement of particle accelerators and detection technologies; and To transfer knowledge, train highly skilled personnel, and commercialize research for the economic, social, environmental and health benefit of all Canadians.
TRIUMF has four programs involving medical isotope production.
We've had a 30-year collaboration with MDS Nordion aiding them to produce 15% of Canada's medical isotopes. We produce 2.5 million patient doses per year. This is done with three small cyclotrons, or particle accelerators, which run essentially 24/7. There are about 90 staff, roughly 50 from MDS Nordion and about 40 from TRIUMF, who operate the cyclotrons. This has been a very successful partnership.
TRIUMF also produces isotopes with its main high-energy cyclotron, the 500 MeV cyclotron, which is the core of the facility. TRIUMF also has produced more than 6,000 patient doses of FDG, a sugar labeled with F-18, for the B.C. Cancer Agency in the last three years. We've done that since they entered into the business of PET screening for cancer patients, including several hundred children. These are produced using another small cyclotron at TRIUMF. The contacts would be Don Wilson and Francois Benard from BCCA.
TRIUMF also produces all the isotopes for the Pacific Parkinson's Research Centre at UBC, which has roughly 1,500 patients a year. That program is led by Dr. Jon Stoessl from UBC and Dr. Tom Ruth from TRIUMF. This is a highly successful 20-year program. Dr. Ruth is a radiochemist and a world expert on the production of medical isotopes. He's served on U.S. academies addressing medical isotope production and so on, so I would recommend him to you as one of Canada's true experts in this field. In this case, we produce primarily F-18 and C-11.
There are about eight operational cyclotrons in Canada in major medical centres and another eight being installed or commissioned, for a total of sixteen. For example, the Ottawa Heart Institute has its own cyclotron for producing medical isotopes, which are primarily focused on PET imaging.
These cyclotrons make isotopes primarily for PET, or positron emission tomography. That's a three-dimensional imaging of the metabolism of the patient. There are about 30 PET scanners in Canada. There are about 300 in the U.S. There are about 400 cyclotrons listed in the IAEA database around the world that are non-commercial. So that's 400 cyclotrons. If you include commercial cyclotrons, you have to guess, but it's about 900 worldwide.
PET is gaining a significant role in cancer screening, because it's able to assess the response to your cancer therapy.
Let me mention SPECT. There are two imaging modalities that are primarily used in nuclear medicine. One is SPECT, which is the older workhorse of the industry. It stands for single photon emission computed tomography. It drives the field today. There are about 900 SPECT cameras in Canada. I'm guessing that you have about eight processes per day, so if I round up, I can say that there are about 10,000 per day in Canada. It's larger than PET by about a factor of ten. PET is more advanced, more expensive, and to me, in the future, is the one that's going to be taking over in the field.
The sales of PET exceeded SPECT in the U.S. last year for the first time, so it gives you a sense that the field is changing.
PET is now purchased in combination with a CT scanner, which is an imaging X-ray, and you can also buy a SPECT with a CT scanner. You buy either a PET/CT or a SPECT/CT.
SPECT uses technetium-99. PET uses primarily FDG. They both can use other things, but they are the two.
The lifetime of FDG--or the half-life, to be more precise--is about two hours. The half life of technetium, as you know, is probably about six hours. The difference there is that SPECT uses technetium-99, which comes from a generator of molybdenum-99, and that generator is distributed around. For the FDG, you just produce it directly.
One final comment about TRIUMF is that its research, internally, is focused primarily on producing unstable isotopes, so in some sense, the business of TRIUMF is producing either this generation of isotopes or the next generation of isotopes.
I'll just stop there and wait for questions.
