Cross-section of the production of theranostic-relevant terbium isotopes by deuterons beam irradiation of dysprosium targets

Recently, lot of interest has arisen in studying the production of four terbium radioisotopes that could be employed for therapy and diagnostic in nuclear medicine. 149Tb can be used for both alpha targeted radiotherapy and PET imaging due to its double decay modality, 152Tb and 155Tb have suitable characteristics for SPECT and PET imaging techniques respectively, while 161Tb, whose decay comes with an intense Auger electrons emission, may found medical application in the Auger Targeted Radiation therapy. Several production routes have been proposed. We investigated the possibility to produce high specific activity terbium radioisotopes via the natDy(d, x )1xxTb reactions, by determining the cross-section and the thin target yield in an energy range between 15 and 32MeV for the incident deuterons beam. Targets have been irradiated with the ARRONAX cyclotron (Saint-Herblain, Nantes, France) using the stacked foil technique. The determination of the produced activity using high-resolution gamma-ray spectrometry was performed at LASA laboratory (Segrate, Milano). In this contribution we present the preliminary results of this work and the future perspectives.