Evaluation of an unshielded luminescence flow-through radio-HPLC detector for LC quality control and preparation of PET radiopharmaceuticals

Radio-HPLC is an essential method to assess the purity of PET radiopharmaceuticals. The usual NaI scintillator radiodetector requires heavy, costly and cumbersome lead shielding. The luminescence LB 500 fLumo detector has been developed to tackle these drawbacks and achieve high sensitivity. The fLumo uses a photon counting detector combined with a flow-through cell modified with a solid melt-on scintillator only sensitive to the positron. This study demonstrates the usefulness of the fLumo for analysis and purification of PET radiopharmaceuticals.

► We evaluate a novel unshielded luminescence flow-through radio-HPLC detector (fLumo) which is only sensitive to the positron and insensitive to gamma rays for applications in PET radiopharmaceuticals analysis and preparation.
► The fLumo detector exhibits a low limit of detection as activities as low as 4 kBq are detected (HPLC and UPLC radiodetectors).
► The fLumo detector demonstrates excellent linearity (0.2 to 2500 MBq/ml, r2>0.995) and reproducibility.
► Thanks to its compactness and absence of shielding, the fLumo has been installed in a production shielded “hot” cell to detect radiocompounds during a semi-preparative HPLC purification.
► This work demonstrates the value of the fLumo luminescence flow-through radio-HPLC detector for applications in PET tracers radiochemistry.