Estimated Isotopic Compositions of Yb in Enriched 176Yb for Producing 177Lu with High Radionuclide Purity by 176Yb(d,x)177Lu

Recently, great interest has arisen concerning 177Lu as one of the most important therapeutic radionuclides for treating neuroendocrine tumors. This has driven demand for 177Lu with high radionuclide purity produced in accelerators, by using highly enriched 176Yb samples to develop a variety of 177Lu-labelled radiopharmaceuticals. In this paper, a method is presented to estimate isotopic compositions of enriched 176Yb samples required for achieving large-scale production of 177Lu having high radionuclide purity by the 176Yb(d,x)177Lu reaction. These isotopic compositions were estimated using the latest measured excitation functions of the natYb(d,x)Lu reaction that were confirmed in this study by measuring the integral yields of the reaction, and a particle transport simulation code. The estimated radionuclide purity of 177Lu for commercially available enriched 176Yb sample is over 99% at a deuteron energy of 20 MeV. The method plays an important role in determining isotopic compositions of enriched samples for producing high purity medical radionuclides in accelerators.