Oak Ridge Lab Advances Actinium-225 Cancer Therapy
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- Oak Ridge National Laboratory produces more than 300 isotopes available to researchers and has supplied medical radioisotopes since 1946, according to associate lab director Jeremy Busby.
- ORNL's isotope portfolio includes lead-212, now in clinical trials for liver, prostate, and skin cancers, and actinium-227, which decays to radium-223 in the approved prostate cancer drug Xofigo.
- Sandra Davern leads two initiatives: the ARM program building chelators that label radioisotopes onto antibodies under mild conditions, and the five-year DART theranostics effort with the University of Tennessee and UT Health Science Center.
- ORNL chemist Nikki Thiele and collaborators from Washington University in St. Louis, Notre Dame, and UC Santa Cruz published in Chemical Science on a chelator called PYTA that binds at least four radioisotopes: actinium-225, lutetium-177, indium-111, and scandium-44.
- Researchers are designing nanoparticles specifically to hold alpha emitters at tumor sites, preventing radioactive decay daughters from migrating to healthy tissue during treatment.
- The team is applying artificial intelligence and quantum mechanical computer simulations to model radioisotope behavior and refine how they behave inside the body.
Why it matters: ORNL already supplies radioisotopes used in approved cancer drugs like Xofigo and active clinical trials, so its push to develop chelators that bind multiple isotopes at once could give drug developers a more flexible toolkit for next-generation targeted alpha and theranostic therapies. Holding decay daughters at the tumor site addresses one of the field's biggest toxicity problems.
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