AREVA announced today that its subsidiary AREVA Med, which specializes in nuclear medicine, has received authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin U.S. clinical trials for a new treatment aimed at combating cancer. This is the first such authorization for clinical trials using the lead-212 isotope worldwide.

AREVA has developed a process for extracting lead-212 from thorium derived from its industrial activities. Lead-212 is a rare radioactive isotope that lies at the heart of promising nuclear medical research to develop new cancer treatments. This innovative approach, known as alpha radio-immunotherapy, specifically pinpoints and destroys cancer cells while limiting toxicity to healthy cells.

Phase I* clinical trials will begin this year in the United States and will take approximately two years to complete.

“Nuclear energy and nuclear medicine are technology- and capital-intensive disciplines that have strong historical links. AREVA is a forward-thinking company, and our investment in AREVA Med is one of many aimed at developing innovative solutions that improve people’s lives. This landmark FDA authorization is a very important step that could lead to a potential treatment for very aggressive and lethal cancers,” said Jacques Besnainou, CEO of AREVA North America.

“This decisive FDA authorization brings us much closer to our ultimate goal – creating innovative treatments to combat cancer. This authorization represents a major recognition of the expertise and commitment of AREVA’s team and that of our top-notch scientific partners,” said Patrick Bourdet, President and CEO of AREVA Med.

In nuclear medicine, the development of new treatments is constrained by the availability of isotopes. AREVA announced in 2010 the construction of a facility to produce lead-212 in the Limousin region of France, which would facilitate the creation of new treatments for patients.

For more information, please visit: www.areva.com and www.arevamed.com.

*A Phase I clinical trial primarily aims at confirming the safety of treatments in patients.

by Gilles Clement, Vice-President of Recycling Technologies, and Dr. Alan Hanson, Executive Vice President of Technology and Used-Fuel Management

Today we’d like to highlight a thought-provoking question about recycling that was asked recently on the AREVA North America blog.

Randal Leavitt asked:

Recycling fission fuel is better than not recycling, but there are other approaches that are better still. My preferred technology is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor. How do we shift the nuclear industry over to this technology?

Randal,
We definitely agree that recycling used fuel is much better than “throwing it away” (i.e: direct disposal). The ability to shift the nuclear industry to a new technology is really something that is determined by the success of three conditions:
1. It must be proven and demonstrated at large industrial scale
2. It must be economically justified as compared to other alternatives
3. It must be licensed by the appropriate nuclear regulatory authorities

Large scale deployment of new technology requires – as soon as the principles are reasonably well stabilized and enough data from R&D is available – the preparation of a thorough and credible business case to justify the large investments needed to develop it.

To demonstrate that a new technology is fully proven and obtain the final license, one has to go through a lengthy piloting process. This involves designing, building and operating a series of “pilot models” of progressively increasing scale. A first model is developed to evaluate and understand the basic performance of the new technology, and it takes several years to test it rigorously. This first step is followed by incremental increases in the scale and the capacity of the models, (generally two further steps) to reach full commercial production size. The final model is considered as pre-industrial and is used to demonstrate the full range of safety, security and reliability requirements. Today nuclear reactors fueled with thorium have not yet been shown to meet the three conditions.