Cyclotron & Radio
pharmaceutical Core

Core Director: Meixiang (Max) Yu, PhD 

To learn more about this core please download core brochure or contact our core director.
Meixiang (Max) Yu, PhD
myu@houstonmethodist.org

To schedule resources for this core, please or login to iLab

The Cyclotron and Radiopharmaceutical Core is a cGMP-compliant facility that produces clinical grade and rare custom radiopharmaceuticals for research and medical applications. The facility operates a GE PETrace cyclotron that creates tracers for positron emission tomography scans (PET). These clinical grade tracers have half-lives ranging from 2 minutes to 12 hours. We can make tracers that are not commercially available; we can also produce multiple doses for a patient in a single day. In addition to tracer production, our PET imaging services can render images of cancer types that are not possible with traditional imaging, including images of prostate, renal and certain types of brain cancers. The PET services we provide are also used in neurology to diagnose dementias, in cardiology to detect coronary artery disease and in drug development to produce non-invasive measurement of in vivo drug interaction profiles, requiring only minute amounts of the testing drug to be administered.

For a list of available PET Radiopharmaceuticals and to learn more about the core services, please download the brochure.

For more on the PET scanning component of our core, visit the Positron Emission Tomography Facility page.