10142561Harvesting the UK's Radionuclide Assets for Medical ApplicationsClosedFeasibility StudiesInnovate UKEach year, diagnosis, treatment and care for cancer patients in the UK accounts for ca £5.7bn in direct spend, with one in two people in the UK likely to develop some form of cancer in their lifetime. This is forecast to increase in prevalence over the next ten years. Cancer outcomes in the UK lag significantly behind comparator countries with one-year and five-year cancer survival estimates lower for all but two major cancer groups. One of the key underlying reasons for this has been a market failure to invest in the infrastructure necessary to support early pre-clinical and clinical trials into new radiopharmaceutical treatments. New treatments such as targeted alpha therapy (TAT) are predicted to one day replace current chemotherapy treatments. They are more targeted, more effective, and have fewer side-effects. Other countries have been researching and developing these treatments for a considerable time. If we do nothing and continue with the current market failure, UK patients may be denied future access to potentially life-saving treatments that are available elsewhere in the world. Drawing on its longstanding capability of isotope separation for nuclear fuel recycling, NNL has been developing processes to extract and purify potential TAT radionuclides from nuclear waste for the last 8 years. A promising route, which has been developed to significant maturity, is the extracting of lead-212 (via its parent radionuclide thorium-228) from reprocessed uranium, large stockpiles of which are held in the spent nuclear fuel inventory of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. The process of chemical separating these radioisotopes has been successfully established at lab bench scale, supported by both NNL's own investment and, latterly, DESNZ's Medical Radionuclide Innovation Programme (MRIP). Work is now ongoing to scale this up , however, this would still only produce lead-212 in very small quantities and would not be sufficient to provide it to researchers in the quantities they need. This EOI would look at scaling up the lead-212 extraction and purification process further, in order to achieve significant quantities of material, to a specification suitable for researchers and drug development companies to use it for TAT research and development.