Progress in the development of technetium-99m technology in South Africa

Since April 1974 the Isotope Production Centre at Pelindaba has made a considerable contribution to nuclear medicine in South Africa by producing 21 000 technetium-99m generators and a large number of technetium-99m labelling kits. Over the last 20 years technetium-99m has achieved a dominant position among the diagnostic tools in modern nuclear medicine. The value of the annual production of this radionuclide, on a worldwide scale, is estimated at $300 million. Many improvements and changes have been made to technetium-99m generators since they were introduced to nuclear medicine in the late 1950's. In the industrialized countries of the world the nuclear medicine profession is accustomed to using the portable chromatographic generator utilizing fission-molybdenum-99m as its common source of technetium-99m. The new Peltek-F sterile technetium-99m generator developed by the Isotope Production Centre is an excellent example of progress made in the development of technetium-99m technology in South Africa. This generator compares very favourable with some of the best in the world today especially with regard to performance, quality and safety. Although a large number of technetium-99m labelling kits are commercially available, much research is still going on and within the past few years a large number of physiologically relevant compounds have been labelled with technetium-99m and have been clinically tested in particular for brain perfusion studies, myocardial scintigraphy and the determination of total renal clearance. On a more limited scale researchers of the Isotope Production Centre are concentrating on some of the most important of these products. There are promising signs that with these new compounds the significance of technetium-99m in nuclear medicine will increase