Yorkshire hospital to offer ‘gold standard’ scans for prostate cancer patients

It comes after the long-awaited handover of the £9m Molecular Imaging Research Centre (MIRC) facility at Castle Hill Hospital near Cottingham in September, after years of fundraising by the Daisy Appeal.

The MIRC contains a “particle accelerator” known as a cyclotron, which makes radioactive drugs or tracers, which are used when scanning for cancer, dementia and heart disease.

The first tracer to be produced at the MIRC will use a substance called Gallium-68, which has to be made on the day of the patient's scan as it's only radioactive for just a few hours.

For prostate cancer imaging, gallium-68 is combined with a "carrier molecule" which, when injected into a patient, seeks out and sticks to a protein found in prostate cancer called prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA).

The patient is placed in a PET-CT scanner, which shows where the gallium-68 has located, highlighting tumours which may have spread throughout the body, as "glowing dots".

Understanding the extent of the spread of prostate cancer helps clinicians better treat the disease, and these scans can be more effective than other imaging techniques.

Hull is now one of only a handful of hospital sites in the country to have a cyclotron which allows staff to produce tracers onsite for NHS patients, as well as developing their own through cutting-edge research.

Prostate cancer patients previously would have to travel to hospitals in London for a PSMA PET scan.

"We are one of the few centres in the north with capabilities to do this," said Dr Louis Allott, Head of Radiochemistry at the MIRC.

"It will have a phenomenal impact on patients in the area who will have access to this radiotracer that they wouldn't necessarily have had before."

The technology will allow the hospital to deliver improved clinical imaging to diagnose and monitor treatment response in cancer, cardiac and neurological patients.

Dr Allott said: "With prostate cancer and PSMA, we are talking about one particular disease and tracer, but the whole point of the MIRC is to bring novel tracers and new research to many types of disease, ranging from cancer, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and cardiac disease.

"We will be bringing a variety of clinical trials into the area that patients can enroll into, and potentially benefit from."

The Daisy Appeal has raised £12.5m to fund cutting-edge research and state-of-the-art equipment and facilities since it was established in 2000.

It is aiming to raise £3m for a new scanner, to replace the original model installed in 2014 and which provides more than 4,500 PET scans a year. It comes as demand for PET scans is set to rise 10 to 15 per cent year on year, for the next five years.

Fundraisers are keen to hear from anybody who can help, whether with sizeable corporate donations or small amounts from community events.