$1.9-Million Doughnut Will Get Brain Research Rolling

After 5 years of waiting, UC Irvine on Wednesday will receive the most expensive piece of equipment it has ever bought: a $1.9-million cyclotron.

The 22-ton, doughnut-shaped machine will enable UCI’s psychiatry department to create its own radioactive isotopes instead of ferrying them in by chartered plane from UC Davis for $2,000 a week.

The ready availability of the isotopes, used to track chemicals in the brain, will allow UCI researchers to perform brain scans on up to 40 patients a week, instead of the three patients a week they examine now, said Wade Rose, assistant dean of UCI’s medical school.

The cyclotron will also allow psychiatrists to broaden their research into the chemistry of schizophrenia, dreams and depression. Scientists will examine the interaction of new chemicals on the brain and study children as well as adults.

“In one bold step,” said Dr. Richard Haier, an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior, “psychiatry’s gone from the advanced technology of Freud’s couch to the super technology of brain imaging.”

Despite the excitement, the cyclotron is not expected to begin manufacturing isotopes until March.

UCI has raised $700,000 toward buying the Swedish-made cyclotron. Private donors have reportedly pledged another $600,000 toward its purchase.

But Rose was optimistic that over the next 6 years UCI will have no trouble making the $30,000-a-month payments on the machine.

“I think there’s sufficient interest in the community,” he said.

A committee founded by Corona del Mar philanthropist Athalie Clarke raised most of the money, including a $575,000 grant from the nonprofit Irvine Health Foundation.

So when the bright-yellow cyclotron is lowered by crane Wednesday into a concrete-lined vault at the UCI Medical School, psychiatry professor Monte S. Buchsbaum said he will probably break out champagne.

“The vault was built 5 years ago by the psychiatry department in anticipation that someday we’d have a cyclotron,” he said. “Now it’s coming to pass.”

A cyclotron uses an oscillating electrostatic field and homogeneous magnetic field to cause a particle to move in a spiral path with increasing kinetic energy until the particle’s velocity is sufficient to bring about nuclear transformations, such as the radioactive isotopes, upon collision with a suitable target.

Buchsbaum directs UCI’s research into brain imaging and has received a $700,000 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to continue studies into the chemistry of the brain during sleep.

But without a cyclotron, Buchsbaum and his colleagues said, they have used their $1-million brain scanning device just once a week and have had to limit the kind of research performed. And they had to deal with the cumbersome and expensive process of flying the isotopes in from UC Davis.

On Wednesdays, the isotopes, with a half-life of just 110 minutes, have been flown the 450 miles from Sacramento to John Wayne Airport in Irvine. If fog rolled in and the flight was delayed, time ran out for the isotope, and UCI researchers had to cancel the night’s experiment.

If all went well, the isotopes were rushed to the medical school, where Buchsbaum and his team injected them into research subjects and conducted the evening’s three brain studies.

Minute Amounts Metabolized

During a scan, minute amounts of the isotope in glucose solution are metabolized by the brain. As the research subject reads or solves a puzzle, the brain burns glucose, the radioactive isotope is released and the positron emission scanner picks up the extraordinary image--a colored picture--of the brain at work.

But with their own cyclotron to manufacture isotopes, researchers will be able to scan eight brains a day, 7 days a week, Wade and Buchsbaum said.

UCI will perform brain scans of head-injury patients, helping to diagnose what portion of the brain is damaged, Buchsbaum said.

And UCI researchers expect that their own cyclotron will manufacture isotopes with much shorter half-lives, 10 minutes or less, which will enable them to expand their studies of children, who usually cannot sit still for longer studies, Rose said.

They also expect to manufacture new radioactive chemicals other than the glucose isotope that will study new structures of the brain.

Studying Brain Chemicals

“Some of the shorter-lived isotopes are more interesting, for instance the isotope you use to study dopamine,” Haier said about one of the chemicals in the brain. “So with the cyclotron, we’ll be expanding the breadth of our studies too.”

Although the cyclotron will belong to UCI’s psychiatry department, Rose said it will generate isotopes for other kinds of research as well. For instance, he said, two community hospitals have recently approached UCI about allowing their cardiology departments to use the isotopes and UCI’s scanners to track what happens to victims of heart attacks.