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Scandium is a light metal used in multiple industries, including aluminium alloys for aerospace, industrial tracing, and lighting. Scandium-44 is a synthetic radioisotope produced for imaging, with a half-life of about four hours.
Scandium-44 decays largely by positron emission, making it well suited to PET imaging, and it decays to stable, non-toxic calcium. Its half-life is roughly four times longer than that of gallium-68, allowing imaging at later timepoints, and similar binding chemistry to the therapy isotope lutetium-177.
Scandium-44 is used in PET imaging of cancer, notably with PSMA-targeting ligands for prostate cancer, and serves as the diagnostic partner to the therapeutic isotope scandium-47. Because both are isotopes of the same element, they form a true matched theranostic pair with identical chemistry and behaviour.
Scandium-44 is produced by proton irradiation of an enriched calcium-44 target, or obtained from a titanium-44 generator. Enriched calcium-44 is costly and the generator route is scarce, which has limited availability at the activity levels clinical use requires.
StandardX is developing accelerator-based production to resolve this bottleneck and enable progression of scandium-based medical research.