Royal Society Of Chemistry, Piccadilly, Mayfair, London W1J 0BA
UK
Join Professor Philip Blower and Dr Samantha Terry as they demonstrate how radioactivity is a key part of the treatment of diseases such as cancer.
When people hear the word radioactivity, many automatically think of environmental disasters, weapons of mass destruction and international murder. However, not only is it a part of our natural environment but for well over half a century it has been a key part of medical imaging and treatment of disease, especially cancer. Well-designed molecules, labelled with radioisotopes, can be administered to patients and then find their way to diseased tissue, either lighting it up for a scanner to detect or selectively killing cancer cells. This is the field of nuclear medicine, and it needs scientists from many disciplines – medicine, chemistry, physics and biology – to pool their expertise and work as a team to develop technologies to refine and exploit it for the best possible benefit of patients.
Join Professor Philip Blower as he shows how chemists have contributed to the story of nuclear medicine by harnessing the radiological and chemical properties of elements from all parts of the periodic table, incorporating these radionuclides into peptides, proteins, nanoparticles and other chemical entities. He will explain how these radionuclides help create images of molecular processes in the body to diagnose and treat disease in all major areas of medicine. Dr Samantha Terry will describe the biology behind how radionuclide attached molecules home in on and kill cancer cells, and outline what future treatments are in the pipeline that may prove even more effective.
Philip Blower, Professor of Imaging Chemistry at King’s College London, heads the Department of Imaging Chemistry and Biology based at St Thomas’ Hospital. He has applied chemistry in nuclear medicine since 1987 and has developed and translated several new radionuclide procedures into the clinic. He teaches chemistry at undergraduate and postgraduate level at King’s.
Samantha Terry obtained her PhD from the University of St Andrews in Radiation Biology. Having then worked at the University of Oxford and at the Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, she is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher on the radiation biology of radionuclides at King’s.