The separation of terbium from gadolinium by solvent extraction: Upscaling terbium production for use in radionuclide therapy

¹⁶¹Tb is considered a promising alternative to¹⁷⁷Lu in the treatment of neuroendocrine tumors and prostate cancer. It is produced via neutron irradiation of ¹⁶⁰Gd targets and its subsequent separation from said targets. Current separation methods have limitations so a fast removal method of the Gd bulk is...

Simulation of temperature and dose distribution of a proposed minimally invasive treatment of early‐stage breast cancer by combining thermal ablation and LDR brachytherapy using Pd-103 SPIO nanoparticles

Treatment of early stage breast cancer is generally invasive to a patient's daily life while being treated. Therefore, to diminish the physical and psychological impact during and after recovery, a newly proposed minimally invasive therapy for early-stage breast cancer treatment is proposed. Within this study, this proposed treatment is modelled...

Polymeric micelles as carriers for a 166Dy/166Ho in vivo generator

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Because of this, there are many novel methods to treat it being currently researched. One of the answers from the nuclear medicine perspective is Radionuclide Therapy, where alpha or beta emitters are applied, with the goal to selectively irradiate tumours in the...

Three-dimensional breast cancer spheroids for preclinical assessment: Physical characterization of breast cancer spheroids using GrowDex as scaffolds

Breast cancer is one of the most dangerous forms of cancer worldwide. Continuous research is therefore essential in order to find realistic treatment options. 3D tumor spheroids have been proven to imitate the structural and physiological TME of in vivo tumors relatively more accurate than the more widely used 2D cell cultures.<br/>During this...

Fission products chemistry and scenario analysis of accident progression at Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power station: Investigation of the Ba-Sr-Cs-Mo-O system

The severe accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in 2011 has shown the necessity to study the impact of the release of hazardous fission products. This work investigates the Ba-Cs-Sr-Mo-O system, which contains some of the most abundantly produced fission products, as well as fission products that carry a great health risk on...

The bioavailability of Calcium in Milk: Effect of Temperature

Calcium is an important mineral which the body uses to maintain strong bones and carry out many important bodily functions. According to the Dutch nutrition center people in the Netherlands consume 80-90% of their calcium through milk and other milk products. Often times people will further ’process’ milk for other food products. Examples of...

Calcium Bioavailability and Exchangeability in Milk: An in vitro study to investigate the influence of calcium salt fortification using 45Ca

Calcium is an important nutrient for both young and elderly people which can, among others, stimulate healthy bone growth and prevent osteoporosis. Therefore, nutrition with sufficient calcium is of great importance. The highest calcium nutrient density for all foods can be found in bovine milk, which contains on average 1.2 g Ca / L. To...

Introducing Gold Nanoparticles to Polymeric Nanoclusters containing Chlorin e6 and Doxorubicin: evaluation of influence on release by Ionizing Radiation

Cancer remains responsible for a large part of deaths worldwide. At present most treatments for cancer still give rise to unwanted side-effects. In this thesis, a treatment that combines both chemo- and radiotherapy to reduce the side-effects of chemotherapy is reported. Instead of allowing the drug to spread through the whole body and also...

The hot atom production loop: The investigation of a new radionuclide production loop based on the Szilard-Chalmers effect

Radionuclides are important in the diagnosis and treatment of, amongst others, cancer. A promising therapy is targeted radionuclide therapy, where the radionuclide is brought to the tumor by a targeting specific<br/>vector. Bringing the radionuclide directly to the tumor, should reduce the dose to the healthy tissue. For targeted radionuclide...

Low-cost Benchtop Equipment and Procedures for Organ-on-Chip Prototyping

The Organ on Chip (OoC) market is fast-growing and has the promise to drastically reduce the cost of developing drugs and the need for animal testing. However, the growth could be obstructed by the difficulties of scaling up production of developed prototypes. Most OoC prototypes are not suited for mass production because of the material used,...

Determination of paramagnetic Mn(II) concentrations from bulk magnetic susceptibility shifts in NMR spectra

The recently discovered negative health effects of Gd(III) complexes based magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agents have stirred interest into the development of alternatives based on Mn(II) complexes<br/>due to its biocompatibility, and hence less health concerns. One important aspect of investigation on contrast agents in general, and...

Synthesis of PdO-USPION via Spark Ablation: For Thermal Ablation and Contrast Enhancement

Conventional early-stage breast cancer treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy and external radiotherapy despite their proven short-term efficacy tend to have adverse long-term physiological and psychological implications on the patients. This is primarily due to their inability to spare healthy tissue surrounding the tumor...

Machine learning for knowledge-based dose-volume histogram prediction in prostate cancer

Introduction:  Despite the vast amount of optimization algorithms, radiotherapy treatment planning remains a manual, time-consuming and iterative process. To increase plan standardization, we clinically use Pinnacle's autoplanner for several disease sites. However, this introduces new challenges: first, the autoplanner is not perfect and still...