A new strategy for facile and rapid separation of astatine-211 from nitric acid medium

Abstract

Developing fast and efficient separation avenues can promote either fundamental study or practical application of astatine-211(211At). This work presents a new solid-phase extraction (SPE) separation strategy based on functional resin for recovering 211At from the irradiated bismuth (Bi) target mildly and rapidly, without switching HNO3 medium into HCl system. Four functional resins containing acyl-resin, thioether, sulfonate- and sulfonate-groups had been prepared via Friedel-Crafts acylation and alkylation reactions successfully, and subsequently characterized by FTIR, EA, SEM etc. Acyl-resin from these functional materials have shown good retention towards 211At but low binding affinity to all possible metal impurities (Zn2+, Cu2+, Ga3+and Bi3+) in simulated separation experiments. Static batch sorption experiments indicate that the pseudo-second-order kinetic model is more suitable for describing the binding behavior of 211At on Acyl-resin. This reveals that chemisorption dominates the reaction between the target radionuclide and functional material. During several practical separations in medically-used scale, over 98.5 % of 211At can be well retained on SPE column with metal impurities removed in the process of loading target solution and removing non-target radionuclides. More importantly, 60.03 %∼79.05 % of 211At on the Acyl-resin SPE column is recoverable by NH2OH-NH3·H2O-CH3OH elution process, and over 60 % of the radioactivity distributes in volatile organic solvent (CH3OH). The whole SPE separation process can be completed within 20 min, giving 211At product with high radionuclidic purity (≥ 99 %), low metal impurities (Bi3+≤ 17.37 μg and Cu2+≤ 2.91 μg) and high radiolabeling availability. This work implies that acyl-groups can act as potential binding motifs not only for developing new 211At separation methods but also designing bifunctional conjugate agents for astatinated compounds based on coordination bonds.