New state-of-the-art Good Manufacturing Practice lab at UCL

A state-of-the-art Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) lab has opened at UCL.

The BRC funded facility is designed for production of PET tracers for imaging of patients at University College Hospital, the UCL Institute of Nuclear Medicine and the UCL Cancer Institute.

PET is an advanced medical imaging technique that relies on the use of short-lived radioactive tracers to detect disease processes. By allowing on-demand production of PET tracers, the new GMP facility will greatly increase the potential applications of PET on UCL’s campus, both for diagnostic imaging of patients and as a tool for clinical studies.

The facility will also allow production of tracers for hyperpolarized MRI, an experimental imaging technique that will be trialled in cancer patients at the University College Hospital Macmillan Cancer Centre, as one of only a few sites world-wide.

Director of the new GMP facility and BRC researcher Professor Erik Arstad said: “The opening of the GMP lab is very exciting as it opens up so many possibilities for medical imaging and will allow compounds discovered at UCL to be tested in humans for the first time.”

The GMP facility is located in the Kathleen Lonsdale Building on Gower Place.