Brookhaven's Medical Research

Medical workhorse
In the 1950s, Brookhaven scientists Walter Tucker and Powell Richards developed the radioactive tracer technetium-99m. By 1966, world demand for the tracer was so great that commercial suppliers assumed responsibility for production and distribution.

Parkinson's research
Research on L-dopa to treat Parkinson's disease was begun at Brookhaven by George Cotzias (inset) in the 1960's. While no cure is yet known, L-dopa has helped many patients become self-reliant. During treatment with L-dopa in 1967, this patient was once again able to knit.

Scanning the heart
The first human heart images using Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source were made in 1990, employing a technique called transveneous angiography. Five million Americans have coronary disease, so the goal is to develop this method to image their arteries with less risk than conventional techniques.

Salt and hypertension
In 1952, Brookhaven's Lewis Dahl began his pioneering work connecting salt and hypertension. During 25 years of tests, he discovered that high salt intake was more dangerous in youth, and recommended that no salt should be added to baby foods. He also showed that a person's genetic background greatly affects their susceptibility to hypertension from salt.

Pre-PET scanner
In 1961, Brookhaven chemists studied how to detect small brain tumors by analyzing the decay of radioactive material injected into the bloodstream and absorbed by the tumor. BNL's Instrumentation Division built this detector array. In the 1970's, Brookhaven researchers found a way to reconstruct the detector data into an image of the working brain. This work was an important step toward the modern PET scanner.

Pioneering Diagnostic Tool

Brookhaven's original mission of research in nuclear sciences naturally led to the development of radioisotopes for medical applications. The Laboratory's early years yielded such standards in health care as technetium-99m, which can be used to image almost any organ in the body and is now used in more than 13 million nuclear medicine procedures in the U.S. each year. This tracer was developed at the Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor.

In 1988, Suresh Srivastava (inset, right) and his colleagues patented an easy-to-use kit that attaches technetium-99m to red blood cells so doctors can see blood movement through the heart and other organs. By the mid-1990s, the Brookhaven kit was being used worldwide in more than 2 million such procedures  per year, Licensed to Malinkrodt Medical, Inc., with the help of Peg Bogosian (inset, left), the technology generates royalties that help fund new research, education, and training at the Laboratory.

Treating Parkinson's Disease

Another major medical advance, L-dopa for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, evolved from a 1960s Brookhaven program that used radioisotopes to study the relationship between trace elements and neurological diseases. Parkinson's disease is a degenerative brain disorder causing trembling limbs and sometimes incapacity. Early on, Brookhaven studies showed L-dopa treatments resulted in relief of symptoms in mild cases of the disease and striking improvements in patients with moderately advanced cases. By the 1970's, the Food and Drug Administration released L-dopa for general use by physicians. 

Measuring the health of the heart

Millions of patients worldwide have undergone heart stress tests. But only a few know that these tests use thallium-201, a radioisotope developed at Brookhaven's 60-inch Cyclotron facility. Thallium-201 concentrates mostly in the heart muscle, so doctors with an isotope camera can measure its distribution there. The radioisotope can be injected into the bloodstream of a critically ill heart attack victim, allowing safe and efficient diagnosis of heart damage. It can be used to detect the early stages of heart disease. 

Relieving the pain of cancer

When cancer spreads to the bone, the excruciating pain that results is usually relieved only by continual and heavy sedation. To provide an alternative to sedation, Brookhaven researchers used the High Flux Beam Reactor to develop a radioactive compound called tin-117m DPTA. In the first clinical trials in the mid 1990s, about 80 percent of the patients using the radioisotope experienced some pain relief and 20 percent became almost pain-free.

PET - a window into the body

In the past three decades, Brookhaven has helped pioneer development of a powerful medical imaging technique known as positron emission tomography, or "PET." This technology has since provided a view of the body's inner workings for doctors treating millions of patients and performing medical research worldwide. In fact, a Brookhaven-developed radiotracer, a form of glucose called 18FDG, is now routinely used for cancer diagnosis in almost every PET center in the world.

Brain function

PET research relies on a detector that measures how much of a radiotracer that emits particles called positrons is present in specific areas of the body, such as the brain. With his head inside the circular array of one of Brookhaven's PET machines, PET pioneer Alfred Wolf is both scientist and research subject in this 1983 experiment designed to study how the brain transmits and receives written or spoken ideas.

Addiction research

At Brookhaven's Center for Imaging and Neuroscience, researchers have studied the effects of drugs of abuse on the human brain. In the early 1990's Brookhaven scientists were the first to report that people addicted to cocaine, alcohol and heroin have reduced activity of their brain dopamine system, indicating an under-stimulated reward system. This finding has also been shown to apply to methamphetamine abusers as well as people suffering from obesity. Research at Brookhaven has suggested new approaches to treating addiction, the world's foremost public health problem. See results of current studies in this area or go to the Brookhaven PET page.

Go to the BNL Medical Department website.