Boosting radiochemistry around Europe

Carlotta Taddei is a 2nd year PhD student in the Division of Imaging Sciences & Biomedical Engineering. Her research is about the development of radiopharmaceuticals and radiochemicals for medical diagnostics and research.  Here she talks about her involvement in an international collaboration and her secondment in Amsterdam.

I am part of a project called RADIOMI which is supported by the Marie-Curie Action Innovative Training Networks and has the goal to provide training to produce new talent and innovation in radiochemistry for molecular imaging. The emphasis of this network is focused on training scientists to develop and carry-out innovative radiolabeling with short half-life positron emitting isotopes such as Fluorine-18, Carbon-11 and Nitrogen-13. These novel and improved methodologies will be trialed in the synthesis of known and new radiotracers, such as small molecules, peptides and libraries of biologically active labelled compounds.

The project combines the expertise of leading scientists in radiochemistry around Europe – the University of Oxford, King’s College London, University of Turku, VU University Medical Center Amsterdam, University Claude Bernard Lyon, Medical & Health Science Center Debrecen, CIC BiomaGUNE San Sebastian, Advanced Accelerator Applications and several other associate partners, such as GE Healthcare, Advion, Synthra GmbH and BV Cyclotron VU.

Currently I am part of a group of 15 fellows, 13 Early Stage Researchers and 2 Experienced Researchers. We gather together with our supervisors, advisory board and associate partners every 6 months. During these international meetings we present our individual reports and receive valuable feedback on the ongoing research and suggestions for our future work. So far, there have already been 3 RADIOMI Schools and International meetings, with additional courses at the partner universities. Next meeting will be in November 2015 at CIC BiomaGUNE San Sebastian in Spain with the distinguished international Molecular Imaging Workshop 2015.

Aleksandra Pekosak (ESR at VUmc), Ulrike Filp (ESR at VUmc) Anna Kirjavainen (ER at KCL) and Carlotta Taddei (ESR at KCL) at St Thomas’ Hospital.

As part of the RADIOMI project, the ESR fellows have to carry out research projects in collaboration with the other RADIOMI partner universities, so-called secondments. Our department hosted Aleksandra Pekosak and Ulrike Filp, two ESR RADIOMI fellows from VUmc Amsterdam, during June 2015. We carried out a small research project on carbon-11 chemistry related to our PhD topic. This work continued at VUmc during my secondment period there in August 2015.

Before I arrived in Amsterdam, I was looking forward to carrying out radiochemistry work in a different institution to gain more skills in this field. Personally I think it was a very interesting and fruitful experience. Planning and performing radiochemistry work in a different radiochemistry centre having different rules was good training for me. Luckily we managed to obtain some good preliminary results on our research topics in order to continue our work at our corresponding institutions and strengthen the collaboration between the two partner universities.

I really enjoyed this secondment because it gave me a better understanding of team-work and time-management which can be really useful skills in my research field. In the future I hope to have similar work experience to this and grow my international collaborations so that my research can have an impact in this fascinating field.

Healthcare Science Outreach

Glafkos

Glafkos Havariyoun is a Medical Physicist in the Division of Imaging Sciences & Biomedical Engineering. He is a Trainee Clinical Scientist specialising in imaging with ionising radiation working at King’s College Hospital. Here he talks about his involvement with outreach and what he has learnt by engaging with various audiences. This article was originally posted on the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine website.

When I was in school I unfortunately was never introduced to Healthcare Science (HS) careers through any outreach events. I was very lucky though to have been introduced to Medical Physics as part of my A-level physics, which is where it all started.  Outreach events are not only used to promote HS careers but encourage and inspire young people to enjoy and take Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) classes.  I’m not planning to be a famous science communicator and don’t plan on being the next Brian Cox but I do take every opportunity I have to talk to students about the importance of HS in the current medical era and try and pass on my never ending enthusiasm for it!

Materials and Methods
I have taken part in about ten outreach events and spoken to about n=100 students (σ=0 :)). Events I have taken part in include university open days, Reach Out for Healthcare Science, I’m a Scientist Get Me Out Of Here, school visits to the hospital, and IPEM outreach events including the recent Light in Medicine event part of the UNESCO International Year of Light at the Science Museum Lates . I am also a STEM Ambassador and I would encourage you to join the STEM Network. They provide all the training you need and can support you in any outreach events you would like to do.

Outreach events co-ordinated by IPEM are very organised and everything you might need is provided! Whether it’s a projector and a screen for your presentation or a portable ultrasound scanner and a phantom! All you need is your enthusiasm, excitement and personal experiences from how you came to choose what you are doing now to what your daily job involves! I have prepared and developed a small PowerPoint presentation on what I do as a trainee clinical scientist and use it whenever necessary.  I always try and take some bits and bobs of decommissioned medical physics equipment and show them to students.  Practical and interactive events are always more successful I believe.

Results
I won the I’m a Scientist (IMAS) Get Me Out of Here Medical Physics zone which came with £500 to spend on outreaching! I must admit it was a lot more intense than I thought it would be! This was an online X-factor style competition where four other medical physicists and I answered students’ questions through live chats and offline questions, which we could answer later on at our own convenience.  We all love number crunching and statistics, right? Well, the Medical Physics zone had the most students and live chats of all zones! My profile page had 2,022 views and as you can see in Figure 1 I tried to answer as many questions as possible and participate in as many chats as possible. Figure 2 shows the words that were most used during the chat sessions! I think this figure sums up really well the type of questions we were most asked.
Figure 1: Scientists activity pie chart

  Figure 2: Cool keywords display from live chats!

The questions were so varied from ‘Can you weaponise your research?’ to ‘How far do you think the benefit outweighs the risk when using radiation for medical treatment?’ so be prepared for anything and everything! I must admit that I was caught unprepared at times and I had to ‘Google it’ when it came to non medical-physics specific questions. One of the best feelings was when a student said that we helped them see the importance of science and what they are learning at school and will think about a profession in HS!

The Science Museum Lates event was a totally new experience for me on the other hand! Why? The audience was the general public and this involved adults! I made sure I asked their profession before I started talking to them about the dangers and uses of UV rays or how light is used for blood pressure monitoring in hospitals.  In this way I could adjust my use of science jargon and not waste their and my time if they already knew about it all. All in all it was a great experience and I often found that the public was so interested in medical physics that conversations drifted away to other areas of the profession.  The impression I got, which I think we all know by now, is that not a lot of people know about this career. The reactions I got when explaining what clinical engineers and medical physicists do was truly rewarding!
You get the chance to meet a lot of people as well and the networking throughout the process is invaluable! Last but not least – CV! Participating in outreach events undoubtedly indicates that you enjoy your profession and is proof of your effective communication skills. For those who don’t worry about jobs and have them completely secure I have 3 letters for you, CPD! For trainees I have two words for you, professional competencies!

Conclusions and Discussion
On a personal level I find that being even able to talk about this profession from personal experiences is amazing. I am very lucky to be able to be a part of healthcare science.
I learn new things every single time! You learn how to communicate science at all levels! Not only at international or national conferences which you would do in your day-to-day work. It is a process of learning to explain something in very simple terms and using your own but also the audience’s everyday experiences and knowledge to help understand the importance of healthcare science and grasp the concepts used. At the end of the day we are helping deliver healthcare science to the general public and we should be able to communicate our work to them. Not only will this give recognition to our work, which most of the time is hidden in the background, but will also hopefully inspire future generations!

Vienna – a meeting place of young minds

Dr Samantha Terry, a post doctoral researcher in the Department of Imaging Chemistry & Biology recounts her experience of attending a conference in Vienna.

Sam Terry

I was recently invited to submit an abstract to go for an all-expenses paid trip to Vienna as part of the Young Investigator’s Meeting of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM). I am not one to turn down any offer to travel the world for free, especially not if I get to combine it with meeting other people my age who also work as scientists in the field of nuclear medicine. I was pleased to find my abstract on “Monitoring therapy response with radionuclide imaging” was accepted and was even more pleased to find out that I am still considered young at the age of 30!

So, thanks to the funding provided by the EANM and the British Nuclear Medicine Society, I got to go to Vienna! I had only ever been once before and that was in the wintertime when the weather was so bad all I could manage was to test various hot chocolate establishments and bakeries for Sachertorte. Yum… Sachertorte…

Hill Arches sculpture

During this trip however, the weather was glorious with on average a temperature of 35 degree Celsius. I even managed to find the famous Henry Moore sculpture called ‘Hill Arches’ in front of the Karlskirche, which last time took me two hours to find and even then it was covered in a box with an image of the sculpture!

Back to the meeting; what a great meeting this was. The age range of the 17 participants (ignoring the excellent organisers and chairs Marion de Jong from Erasmus University Medical Center and Tony Gee from King’s College London) was 28-32. Here we all are (I have circled myself but it’s not my best picture!)

17 participants, age range 28-32, 9 countries

The talks were all part of the greater topic “new tracers from bench to bedside” and participants were not only from different disciplines, namely clinicians, physicists, biologists, technologists, and (radio)-chemists, but also from a range of countries, including the UK, Portugal, Belgium, South Korea, Spain, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the Netherlands.

The organisers as well as the Young EANM Committee member Nevena Ristevska created a great set of talks; the only downside was the rather sweltering room in which the talks were held. It didn’t help that the air conditioning unit was initially set at full blast to warm the room! The topics ranged from using radionuclides for imaging to therapy, in phantom models, in vitro, in vivo to clinical work. The prize for best presentation went to Ingrid Bakker, currently a PhD student from Erasmus UMC, the Netherlands who showed that gastrin-releasing peptide (GRP) analogues, when radiolabeled with an isotope called Gallium-68, could aid the diagnosis of patients with prostate cancer by PET/CT imaging by targeting the GRP receptors.

The meeting was a fabulous opportunity for us all to talk about our work and research interests and get feedback and ideas. Not only that but we were able to talk about the ‘behind-the-scenes’ stuff, such as issues with supply, why this generator is a pain and radiolabeling efficiencies are not always 95% or more.

I would recommend this meeting to every young scientist doing science even remotely related to nuclear medicine. Where else would you be able to create your own network of colleagues and friends who are dotted around the world and yet have similar interests, travelled to places you have/would like to go to and have similar worries and obstacles?