Towards 2040 the global cancer burden could rise to 28.4 million cases. Early diagnosis and treatment leads to a higher number of cancer survivors. 68Ga is a promising radionuclide in radio-imaging, and it is often labelled with a labelling link called DOTA in radiopha
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Towards 2040 the global cancer burden could rise to 28.4 million cases. Early diagnosis and treatment leads to a higher number of cancer survivors. 68Ga is a promising radionuclide in radio-imaging, and it is often labelled with a labelling link called DOTA in radiopharmaceuticals. 68Ga can be produced by a 68Ge/68Ga generator. However, the 68Ge supply issue, disposal issue, and an increasing demand in radiotracers for radio-imaging have led to the development of cyclotron production. In this method 68Ga nuclides are produced through proton irradiation of enriched 68Zn solutions. The produced nuclides are extracted from the solutions using a chelator called BPHA. After back extraction, BPHA contamination remains in the final solution and could possibly interfere with the labelling of 68Ga to DOTA. The two objectives of this research were to investigate the effects of BPHA contamination on the labelling of 68Ga to DOTA, and whether the contamination could be washed from the extraction solution. Instant thin layer chromatography, a Wallac gamma counter, and phosphor imaging were used to determine the labelling efficiency in 68Ga solutions with and without BPHA contamination. Experiments have shown that without BPHA contamination an average labelling efficiency of 102.3% ± 2.5% can be calculated from the phosphor imaging, crossing the 100% due to background correction, and an average labelling efficiency of 99.58% ± 0.07% can be calculated from the Wallac gamma counter. In solutions with BPHA contamination this labelling efficiency became 70.8670% ± 41.6798%, showing high error due to major differences in BPHA concentration per extraction solution. In an attempt to remove the BPHA contamination, the extraction solutions were washed with chloroform. The BPHA contamination was measured in UV-Vis absorption, and showed a decrease after one wash. The remaining absorption could be assigned to the solvent. This researched merely addressed the presence of contamination, and did not measure quantitatively. Further research could investigate the quantitative relationship between BPHA contamination concentration and the DOTA-labelling efficiency.