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Terbium is a rare-earth metal remarkable in nuclear medicine for offering four medically useful radioisotopes of a single element. Terbium-152 is a synthetic radioisotope produced for PET imaging, with a half-life of about 17.5 hours.
Terbium-152 decays by positron emission, making it suitable for PET imaging. As one member of the terbium quartet, it shares the identical chemistry of its therapeutic siblings, so a targeting molecule can be imaged with terbium-152 and then treated with a therapeutic terbium isotope using the same chemistry and biodistribution.
Terbium-152 is used for PET imaging with terbium-labelled targeting agents, including somatostatin analogues and PSMA ligands, providing a diagnostic match to therapeutic terbium isotopes and supporting a fully element-matched approach to theranostics.
Terbium-152 is currently produced almost exclusively at large research facilities such as CERN-MEDICIS, by high-energy proton spallation followed by mass separation to isolate the desired isotope. This dependence on a specialised, research-scale process is the central barrier to clinical supply.
StandardX is developing accelerator-based production to bring terbium-152 beyond the research setting.