Isolation of 212Pb from natural thorium for targeted alpha-therapy

Targeted alpha-therapy (TAT) is increasingly attractive due to its extraordinary antitumor efficacy. However, the supply of α-emitters for TAT is insufficient and under control by a limited number of countries. 212Pb is a promising α-emitter with an optimal half-life (10.6 h) and favored decay chain. Of interest, 212Pb can be extracted directly from natural thorium, which may be abundant in the mining waste of rare-earth, uranium, etc. Indeed, radioactive thorium waste has been a longstanding environmental challenge that needs immediate action. Developing an on-demand and facile process to isolate 212Pb from natural thorium would be ideal to meet the above challenges, yet is difficult. In theory, the ratio of 212Pb to natTh is below 10−13 in commercially available thorium salts. As a pilot study, 2.2 MBq of 212Pb was successfully extracted from a 5 L solution of thorium nitrate by using a Pb-selective resin. The radiochemical purity of 212Pb is over 99.9% according to gamma-ray analysis. The purified 212Pb was applied to radiolabel a couple of peptides used in clinics (i.e. PSMA, TATE and FAPI-04), and the radiochemical yields are >85%. Of note, 212Pb can be repeatedly separated from the thorium solution every 2 days. In summary, a practical and scalable method was developed to isolate 212Pb for potentially clinical use, which may be of great importance as it does not require either cyclotron or nuclear reactor.