Solving the technetium medical isotope shortage
The UK has a solution to the potential shortage of technetium-99m – but that’s no reason to be complacent about leaving Euratom
As the first man-made element, technetium was a pioneer of nuclear alchemy. Since its 1937 discovery in a fragment of foil from a cyclotron, atom smashers have swelled the periodic table with more than two dozen synthetic elements. Yet technetium did not simply rest on its laurels – it became a workhorse of medicine.
Technetium-99m is the world’s most widely used medical radioisotope, involved in more than 30 million procedures every year. It decays to release a gamma photon that can be used to monitor beating hearts in real time or pinpoint tumors. With a short half-life of six hours, Tc-99m cannot be stored on hospital shelves. Instead, it is extracted from a generator that contains a longer-lived parent isotope, molybdenum-99.