Steen Jakobsen, April 2016
From a clinical point of view, Fluorine-18 labelled tracers are, due to a longer isotope half-life, ideal as they can be distributed to other places and a single tracer production in the morning is generally enough to cover the needs of several hospitals.
The repertoire of F-18 tracers includes kit-based syntheses like FDG, FES, FET and FCholine as well as standard fluoro-for-tosyl displacement reactions (FAZA, FMISO and TAU) to multi-step reactions as in the production of GE179 (using F18-fluoroethyl) and click chemistry using fluoroethyl azide chemistry.
When the 20-minute half life of a C-11 labelled tracer is too short, we have the possibility to use F18 fluoromethyl halides instead of C11 methyl iodide. This F-18 synthon is actually used in the manufacturing of FCholine.
Lastly, F18-F2 gas is used in the multistep production of F-18 FDOPA (see below); the PET Center is the sole manufacturer of this tracer in Denmark.
