Race against the clock

Onderzoeker in de kijker

Interview with Dr. Anna Pees, Amsterda UMC

Race against the clock! That sounds like a challenging project. Could you briefly explain the goal of your Veni research?

My Veni project aims to develop new radiolabelling strategies with the underexplored radionuclide oxygen-15 to synthesise radiotracers for positron emission tomography. The title of my project refers to the ultrashort half-life of oxygen-15, which is just about two minutes. This means it will be literally a race against the clock to have a 15O-labelled PET tracer synthesised and imaged before the activity has decayed. Commonly used PET nuclides have much longer halflives, e.g. fluorine-18 has a half-life of two hours, which leaves more time for synthesis and imaging. But the short half-life has also its advantages and I like the added challenge.

Dr. Anna Pees (Mainz, Germany) obtained her BSc and MSc degree in Biomedical Chemistry at the Johannes Gutenberg University (Mainz, Germany). From 2016-2021 she pursued her PhD at AmsterdamUMC (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) under supervision of Prof. Dr. D.J. Vugts and Prof. Dr. A. D. Windhorst on the topic of 18F-labelled trifluoromethyl groups. After having briefly worked as a product specialist at BV Cyclotron VU (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) in 2021, she started a postdoctoral fellowship under Prof. Dr. N. Vasdev at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) (Toronto, Canada) where she worked on the development of PET tracers for imaging the endocannabinoid system and other CNS targets. She has recently been awarded a Veni grant to return to AmsterdamUMC for a postdoctoral fellowship on the development of radiolabelling strategies for the short-lived radionuclide oxygen-15.