Abstract:
In recent years, target radionuclide therapy (TRT) has developed rapidly in cancer treatment. Among all available medical radionuclides,
177Lu is one of the most promising nuclides due to its excellent nuclear properties, with related nuclide-labeled drugs achieving great success in the past decade. With the more rapid development and increasingly wider application of
177Lu-labeled drugs, the demand for no carrier added (NCA)
177Lu will increase dramatically, making stable supply of
177Lu become an ignorable issue. At present, the core problem in the commercial production of NCA
177Lu is the separation of
176Yb/
177Lu. The solvent-impregnated-resin method is the most mature and widely used method in the production of NCA
177Lu, and the crucial functional material is the LN2 resin developed by Triskem (France). In fact, the excellent separation performance makes LN2 resin almost be monopolized in the relevant separation process internationally. Although there are some LN2 resin analogues on sale in China currently, the comparability of its real separation ability with imported LN2 resin is still unknown, and their optimal separation process flow needs to be further optimized. To this end, the structures and compositions of domestic and imported LN2 resins were systematically analyzed by SEM, TEM, FT-IR and other characterizations. On this basis, the adsorption and separation performance of the two materials to Yb/Lu was investigated by static adsorption experiments and dynamic column separation, and the effects of different elution conditions on the separation performance of NCA
177Lu were investigated. Finally, the optimal nuclide separation performance was optimized for each kind of LN2 resin by simulated real work experiments. Finally, the best nuclide separation scheme was optimized for each resin under simulated working conditions. It is confirmed that the microstructure, extractant loading and nuclide separation performance of imported and domestic LN2 resins are significantly different. The results show that the supporters of the domestic and imported LN2 resins are polystyrene and polyacrylate resin, respectively, and the domestic LN2 resin has higher extractant loading (mass fraction is 30.6%) and higher static adsorption to Yb
3+ and Lu
3+. In the dynamic column separation experiments, the high extractant loading would block the pores of the domestic LN2 resin, which prevents the effective separation of Yb/Lu and brings about problems such as large volume and bad separation efficiency. In agreement with the literatures, the separation performance of imported LN2 resin is excellent, and good separation can be realized under relatively simple conditions (
RS=1.8). This provides new ideas and technical references for the design of NCA
177Lu separation materials with independent intellectual property rights.