To all of our presenters and participants of the GE Radiopharmacy User Meeting in Birmingham from October 13-14th, 2011, thank you for joining us and sharing your expertise and experiences. A special thank you to our moderator John Clark from the University of Edinburgh for his gracious support of this bi-annual event.

Together we shared thoughts on targetry, new chemistry initiatives, and in a very interactive forum, how GE can continue to help support your PET radiopharmacy. See you all again in Miami and Milan in 2012!

To access the presentations, please click here.

On September 14th, 2011, GE Healthcare hosted a live webcast session with a panel of speakers who shared the regulation and role for the guidance in the United States, how academic sites are meeting the challenges with their solutions, how large scale production has been affected, and how the momentum of cGMP compliance will continue beyond December 12, 2011. You can now view the recorded presentations online and also download the PDF slides.

Click here to access the online content.

Thanks to all for attending the PET Radiopharmacy user group meeting at SNM. We would like to thank our chairman John Clark for facilitating the many wonderful discussions and also all of you, for attending and sharing your wealth of knowledge in the PET radiopharmacy realm.

We value and appreciate the time you took for sharing your experiences on FASTlab. It confirms FASTlab is the platform for expansion of the PET tracer portfolio. In addition FASTlab meets the latest regulatory standards, produces tracers more efficiently and economically and opens the door for academics to define their own tracers.

The PETtrace cyclotrons continue to evolve with the enhanced upgrade experiences presented by two of our customers and also glimpses into future upgrade pathways that GE is currently working on. The PETtrace continues to showcase its reliability and demonstrates its strength as the choice cyclotron to invest in.

We hope to meet you again later this year in Birmingham, and of course, next year in Miami.

We’d like to give a heartfelt thanks to all of you for joining us in Vienna for the 3rd annual GE Cyclotron User Forum.

A special thank you to our meeting chairperson John Clark of the University of Edinburgh for moderating and facilitating many of the engaging discussions. We would also like to thank all of our presenters for taking the time to share their experiences with all of us. We look forward to joining with you all again next year as we continue on the path of partnership together.

Approved presentations from the user meetings along with attendee contact information are uploaded to a sub page of this blog accessible on the right hand side under “user meetings”.

Our European meeting with cyclotron and chemistry users  in Barcelona was a great success again. Thanks to all attendees, presenters and the organizing team. And special thanks to John Clark who moderated this event and surely asked the right questions to start lively discussions.

A key takeaway was the fact that we need to communicate more. One part of this communication is the access to public information inside GE Healthcare. For example only few users knew about our common document library where manuals, data sheets and customer information is available for download. To make this great source of information easily accessible I added a link in the right side bar of this page. Depending on your screen size you may have to scroll down a bit to see this link.
Once you are on CDL, click on Radiopharmacy to get to the cyclotron and chemistry section.

Getting access to the best diagnostic techniques available is the first step towards a solution to your problem. If it’s a broken arm, you need to get an X-ray to understand the type of break and therefore the type of treatment. If it’s cancer you need to undergo a series of examinations to understand the type of cancer you have and its stage of development. Many people nowadays have heard of CT scans or MR, but how many have heard about PET?

Read the full article from Victor Samper on www.grcblog.com

Scientists of MD Anderson Cancer Center (University of Texas, Houston, TX, USA) developed fully automated synthesis sequences for [18]F FAU and [18F] FEAU. These tracers are intended to image tumor proliferation and HSV-tk gene expression. Results have been presented as poster at the World Molecular Imaging Congress 2008 in nice. The poster can be downloaded here.

In collaboration with GE Healthcare a modified TRACERlab FX FN has been used. That special TRACERlab is equipped with a second reaction vessel.  (Note: This special synthesizer is not commercially available).