Radionuclides for theranostics applications: Mn-52 production by deuteron beams irradiation

Now a day the new frontier of Nuclear Medicine (NM) is the use of artificial radionuclides that present nuclear properties suitable for theranostic applications that combine therapy and diagnosis in the same radiopharmaceutical to go in the direction of personalized medicine. This term is applied also to nuclides with properties that can give complementary diagnostic information. A promizing nuclide that presents these characteristics is manganese. In particular manganese-52 is a radionuclide which decays with positron emission and electron capture, with a medium-long half-life (T1/2 = 5.591 d). with possible and promising use in NM as a radiotracer for PET diagnostic tests; the low energy of the positrons emitted (244.6 keV) and the short range in the tissues (0.63 mm) would allow to acquire diagnostic images of a quality similar to those obtained with radiotracers already in use, such as fluorine-18 (252 keV; 0.66 mm). Moreover, the stable isotope of manganese Mn2+ presents paramagnetic properties that make it suitable for use in MRI, opening the possibility of obtaining multi-modal PET / MEMRI images. Currently manganese is produced by irradiation with protons on chromium targets. We have studied the production of Mn-52 using natCr(d,x) nuclear reaction by deuteron beams irradiation, that could be more advantageous. New sets of excitation functions for this nuclear reaction and the co-produced contaminants were obtained and compared with the other sets present in literature and the results of simulation with EMPIRE 3.2.2 and TALYS codes.