Canadian medical experts are scrambling to come up with alternative supplies of medical isotopes, as they grapple with the effects of a supply shortage that has quickly become a worldwide problem.
Dr. Robert Atcher, president of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, calls the worldwide isotope shortage "a crisis" that must be dealt with immediately. Isotopes are used in medical tests for cancer and heart patients, and the shortage is already causing a backlog at Canadian hospitals and treatment centres.
"From our standpoint, it's a crisis," Atcher told CTV News in a recent interview. "So it's very important that we try to find some alternative source of that material so that we can continue to do the imaging studies."
Canada has dealt with a growing shortage of medical isotopes ever since Atomic Energy of Canada's NRU reactor went out of service last month. The Crown-owned reactor located in Chalk River, Ont., normally produces about one-third of the world's medical isotopes.
But it was shut down after a heavy water leak was discovered in mid-May. That was followed by the announcement that the NRU reactor would be out of operation for several months while repairs are completed.
Other major medical isotope producers in South Africa and the Netherlands plan to boost their production levels to compensate for the Canadian shutdown, but it is expected that will only bring the global supply to two-thirds of its normal levels.
In the coming week, nuclear medicine experts from around the world and representatives from isotope-producing countries will meet in Toronto to try to work out a schedule to rectify the supply crisis.
In Canada, smaller hospitals have already reported seeing a slowdown of their own isotope supplies and a recent CTV.ca survey of selected regional health authorities found that some places in Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec have seen severe drops in supply.
Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt, who will be present for the meetings in Toronto, has said the Canadian government is making progress on the isotope issue.
"We're getting there, and it's about working together with the other countries on their maintenance schedules," Raitt said Friday.
One source of new Canadian isotope production may come from the nuclear research reactor at Hamilton's McMaster University. The school has been given federal money to use its reactor to produce medical isotopes that can be used in treating prostate cancer.
Chris Heysel, director of nuclear operations and facilities at McMaster, said it's not the first time that the research reactor has been used to make isotopes.
"We know we can make these isotopes, we've done them in the past," Heysel told CTV News recently. "We did them in the 1970s when there was an outage at Chalk River. The production was moved here."
Another avenue for alternative isotope production in Canada may come from the use of cyclotrons, research devices which are located at hospitals and other research facilities.
Dr. Karen Gulenchyn, the chief of nuclear medicine at Hamilton Health Sciences, said a new type of isotope has been identified that can be made at hospitals or other facilities with on-site cyclotrons for use in bone scans.
"It's made by a cyclotron, which is an instrument that produces high-energy particles and it changes materials into ones that are radioactive and can be used as radioactive tracers."
One drawback of the cyclotron-made isotopes is that they have a short half-life of only 109 minutes, meaning they must be used in close proximity to where they are manufactured.
Gulenchyn calls the new cyclotron-made isotopes "a ready-made, partial-solution using the facilities that we have available to us right now."
She estimates that it might be possible to produce enough cyclotron-made isotopes to supply about 10 per cent of bone scans in Ontario.
While neither cyclotrons nor the McMaster reactor will make up the supply deficit that is needed in Canada at the moment, doctors say these alternative methods of manufacturing isotopes will help some patients receive the urgent care they need.
With files from The Canadian Press and a report from CTV medical specialist Avis Favaro and producer Elizabeth St. Philip
