GE’s FASTLab Provides Turn-Key PET Tracers

GE Healthcare announced at the Annual Congress of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine in Athens, Greece, the release of FASTlab for PET radiopharmaceutical production, a part of GE’s strategy to develop new lines of radiopharmaceuticals, including diagnostic imaging agents.
FASTLab, a new, high-performance chemistry system, features a single-use cassette system which contains pre-measured quantities of all chemicals needed for the synthesis of radiopharmaceuticals accounting for its high yield and high reproducibility. Designed to deliver turn-key production of PET tracers, the first application launched on the platform is FDG for PET.
"The clinical utility of promising new PET tracers developed by academic and commercial research labs needs to be established through multi-institutional trials before they can be approved for common radiology practice", said Dr. Juri Gelovani, Professor of Radiology and Neurology at the University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center. “For such multi-institutional trials, a strictly controlled and consistent cGMP-compliant production at each site or a centralized production and distribution of novel PET tracer candidates will be essential. FASTlab is an integrated cassette-based synthesis system, which will help to accelerate the set up and execution of these trials by providing a common platform for production of PET tracers under the same standard operating procedures (SOP). The goal is to make these innovative tracers available to patients and doctors as soon as possible and at the highest attainable quality.”