Last week, WA NIF hosted Hon. John Carey MLA and Hon. Meredith Hammat MLA as they toured the installation of a new cyclotron facility and radiochemistry laboratory.
WA Health Infrastructure Minister John Carey said that cyclotrons “play a vital role in the health care sector, helping to provide advanced medical imaging procedures to detect deep-lying cancer” and that the new one may “triple the capacity of Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital’s Radiopharmaceutical Production and Development Laboratories.”
WA’s increasing demand for (the greater sensitivity of) PET scans and radiopharmaceuticals has been heard, with WA Government, Australian Government, NIF (for $1.77 million), University of Western Australia, National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and others investing in these capacities.
The WA government said that the new facilities at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital “will supercharge Western Australia’s cancer-fighting capacity.”
As WA NIF points out, “the cyclotron represents a major step forward in radiopharmaceutical innovation”. By co-locating the imaging and radiochemistry infrastructure and experts, clinicians and scientists can “access new tracers, expand clinical trial opportunities, and accelerate the translation of discoveries into improved patient outcomes”.
This is a leap forward toward bigger health impacts for many Australians in the west. The project forms part of the Radiopharmaceutical Production and Development Laboratories and Cyclotron Project, including state-of-the-art laboratories and a second cyclotron machine, providing improved access to radiopharmaceutical products for Western Australian patients and medical researchers.
The facility also includes a Good Manufacturing Practice lab with a dedicated row of hot cells designed for handling and examining radioactive materials used in nuclear imaging work (e.g. PET, SPECT) that can be used for developing new therapies.
READ MORE details in the WA Government’s article here.
Image shows an example of radiochemistry facilities within the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute