Accurate determination of half-life and radionuclidic purity of reactor produced ^177gLu (^177mLu) for metabolic radiotherapy

Abstract

Thanks to its favorable decay characteristics, ^177gLu is finding several applications in nuclear medicine, especially for palliative metabolic radiotherapy of cancer and radioimunotherapy. ^177gLu is produced in thermal nuclear reactor either by direct neutron capture ¹⁷⁶Lu(n,γ)^177(m+g)Lu on either natural or enriched ¹⁷⁶Lu target, or by reaction on enriched ¹⁷⁶Yb target followed by negatron decay. The latter method does produce a high radionuclidic purity and high specific activity radionuclide in no-carrier-added form, since ¹⁷⁷Yb decays solely to the ground state ^177gLu. Conversely, the first method does produce a low specific activity ^177gLu in carrier-added form,¹ contaminated by the long-lived radioisotopic impurity ^177mLu. The accurate determination of radionuclidic purity and half-life of ^177gLu carried out by HPGe and LSCS is presented in some details.