Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Radioisotopes form the backbone of all nuclear imaging and therapeutic nuclear medicine applications. Historically, Canada has played a key role in its production and supply at home as well as internationally. The most common nuclear imaging isotope, Tc-99m, is used on 75,000 patients daily. Around 40% of the world's supply of Tc-99m is being produced at the nuclear reactor in Chalk River, Ontario. The recent down time of the Canadian reactor with the three other facilities that together supply more than 90% of the global demand caused a worldwide isotope crisis' - delaying imaging and treatment of patients with a variety of illnesses. To avoid this scenario in the future, the Canadian government asked the Canadian research community to investigate alternative isotope production. Several solutions are possible and the route via low-energy cyclotrons (< 30 MeV), led by TRIUMF in Vancouver, is very promising and received the NSERC Brockhouse Award in 2015. Numerous new cyclotron facilities have now been funded and built across Canada, making it possible to supply local research communities with isotopes.*The proposed research program taps into the increasing availability of medical cyclotrons and investigates the targets used to make these isotopes. In particular it looks at why the radioisotopic yield of liquid and gas targets is often far below the theoretically achievable yield. We hypothesize that transport phenomena occurring in the liquid and gas are affecting the recoverable yield. The program is therefore investigating the transport phenomena occurring in liquid and gas targets under proton bombardment via simulation and experiment. This problem falls into the broad class of fluid-solid interaction problems found within the transport phenomena literature. What makes this problem particularly difficult is that there is a two-way coupling between the reaction rates and the properties of the fluid. The vision of the proposed program is to develop new production solutions for existing medical isotopes in higher quantities as well as to enable the production of new and emerging isotopes.*