July 16, 2009

Warren Chan custom designs tiny particles that glow red, blue or yellow. One day, they could be used instead of radioactive isotopes to help doctors learn what is happening inside a patient’s body.

It is a little like making Kool-Aid, says the researcher at the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto. You need $50,000 worth of lab equipment and a technician trained in synthetic chemistry. What you don’t need is a nuclear reactor like the one recently shut down in Chalk River, Ont., leading to a shortage of isotopes used in heart, bone and cardiac scans.

Read the full story online at the Globe and Mail.