Local doctor breaks ground on cancer-treatment building
Published: July 24, 2002
With the push of a shovel, Oklahomans entered a new age of cancer fighting today.
Within the year you will be able to catch cancer cells in their infancy before they're even detectable on a CAT scan.
Newsnine's Angela Buckelew tells us about PET scans and what's coming to Oklahoma.
A PET scan uses radioactive isotopes to find cancer cells. The problem has been we don't have the machine that makes the isotopes in the state. We soon will.
This is what a full scale cyclotron looks like . . . This is a mockup of a cyclotron which makes the isotopes needed for a PET scan.
Electricity powers four triangular superconducting magnets.
"What they do is they excellerate particles in a circle," said Dr. George Chacko.
Chacko tells us the cyclotron spins radioactive molecules, then slams it into a target. That creates a radioactive isotope. Glucose is then attatched to the isotope. That's because cancer cells gobble up glucose.
That glucose consumption is then measured, and cancer is found - in it's earliest stages. Success depends on the isotope.
"It's a tracer attached to a sugar molecule, and this sugar molecule is specially synthesized so that it's absorbed by cancer and non-cancer cells," said Dr. Chacko.
Right now, Dr. Chacko has to fly in radioactive isotopes from Texas. That is a problem because the radioactive molecules only have a short life, and if there's bad weather there's no way to get them here.
Today, he broke ground on a building that will be built by November. It will provide Oklahoma with these life-saving isotopes.
In the crowd were Gary and Mary England. Mary credits a PET scan for saving her life.
"I'd had surgery," mary said. "They thought they had it. I had a a PET scan and they didn't have it at all."
The center will be called Midwest Medical Isotopes.
PET scans are can also be used to detect Alzheimers and Parkinsons disease . . . and to see if heart muscle is dead after a person has a heart attack.
Right now, a PET scan will run you $2,500 - $4,500, but the number should come down when more isotopes become available.
Dr. Chako tells us people in Japan use PET scans as preventive medicine., adding the radiation you get from one is comparable to a CAT scan.
