Facile fully automated radiosynthesis and quality control of O-(2-[18F]fluoroethyl)-l-tyrosine ([18F]FET) for human brain tumor imaging.

O-(2-[¹⁸F]Fluoroethyl)-_l-tyrosine ([¹⁸F]FET) has become one of the most successful amino acid tracers for human brain tumor imaging with positron emission tomography (PET). Facile fully automated radiosynthesis and quality control (QC) of [¹⁸F]FET using our home-built automated multi-purpose ¹⁸F-radiosynthesis module are described. [¹⁸F]FET was produced in 75-80 min overall synthesis time with 20-25% radiochemical yield decay corrected to end of bombardment (EOB), based on H[¹⁸F]F. The radiochemical and enantiomeric purities were >99%, and the molar activity (A_m) was 189-411 GBq/μmol at EOB. The [¹⁸F]FET dose meets all QC criteria for clinical use, and is suitable for clinical PET study of brain tumor.