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New Zealand cancer patients are a step closer to having ready access to a highly sensitive form of x-ray scanning after a decision to build a $5 million facility near Auckland Airport.
Only five or six patients a week can be given the scans at the sole provider of them in New Zealand, Wellington's Pacific Radiology. Up to 200 patients a year are sent to Australia for the scans.
Now Australian company Cyclotek intends to set up a facility in Auckland to make the radioactive material that is used in PET (positron emission tomography) scanning. The cyclotron - a machine about the size of a fridge - and associated production laboratory will be near the airport to allow fresh supplies of the radioactive material, which decays quickly, to be flown to clinics throughout New Zealand each day.
Pacific Radiology currently imports the material from Australia, but because of its short, 109-minute half life, it must be made in New Zealand if the country is to do a significant amount of PET scanning, a technology used widely overseas.
A director of Cyclotek, Greg Santamaria, said it still had to obtain regulatory approvals from the National Radiation Laboratory and other agencies, but was confident this would be straightforward.
PET scans are mainly used in cancer, but also for some neurological and heart diseases. They are far more sensitive than CT or MRI scans in detecting cancers. A leading use is in avoiding the costs and trauma of major surgery in patients for whom a scan shows surgery would be of no help. They can instead go straight on to other treatments or, if the cancer is incurable, to palliative care.
PET scanning is also becoming increasingly important in the development of cancer drugs.
Doctors and private Auckland hospital company MercyAscot welcomed the Cyclotek commitment, after the chief executives of the 21 district health boards rejected a proposal for the public health sector to buy one cyclotron and $3 million scanners initially for Auckland and Wellington or Christchurch.
"I think it's fantastic news for the country," said MercyAscot chief executive Andrew Wong.
He said he would now accelerate development of the business case to his board and to Mercy Radiology to install a hybrid PET-CT scanner at the cancer centre planned for the Mercy site in Epsom.
But with PET scanning now being taken up by the private sector, the issues for the district health boards will now be the price they are prepared to pay for scans and which diseases will be covered by state funding.
DHBs spokesman Murray George said private-sector PET scanning "might mean there could be more of those done in New Zealand than previously".
He said the chief executives' group had asked health officials for guidelines on what conditions PET scans should be used for to be written by year's end.
Auckland University oncology professor Michael Findlay said he was delighted a cyclotron was on the way because it was inappropriate for patients to have to go to Australia.
But siting it near the airport would limit its value for research.
