A Tri-City group is launching a campaign to gather the support and publicity needed to improve the health of the nation's medical isotope industry.

Its ideas range from finding a celebrity who can catch the attention of Congress to recruiting local business leaders to put pressure on the Battelle Memorial Institute to reconsider its decision to temporarily reassign its isotope research group in Richland.

Citizens for Medical Isotopes, originally Tri-Cities Committee for Isotopes, believes both thousands of cancer patients and the Tri-Cities would benefit.

"Our vision is this would be a world center in the production, application and treatment with medical isotopes," said Bob Schenter, a spokesman for the group and a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scientist.

Work toward one part of that goal hit a setback this winter, when PNNL officials said employees in its medical isotopes research group would have to be assigned to other projects until money is found to continue their work. Battelle operates PNNL for the Department of Energy.

In promising experimental therapies, radioactive isotopes are attached to antibodies that seek out and attach to cancer cells throughout the body. Radiation from the isotopes then can destroy the cancer cells with little damage to healthy cells nearby and without debilitating side effects that accompany treatments such as chemotherapy.

Tri-City business and medical leaders signed a letter last week asking Battelle for more support for the isotope program.

Battelle must "use its best efforts to find a way to keep its current PNNL medical isotopes team intact ... to help with the community's efforts," the letter said.

Those who signed the letter said they also would aggressively seek more money from DOE for PNNL's isotope programs and national medical isotope activities.

"In addition, we ask that you make medical isotopes programs at PNNL a high budgetary and programmatic priority and an important part of your requests of the (Clinton) administration and the Congress for fiscal year 2001 and beyond," the letter said.

It also asked that business spinoffs and licensing from medical isotopes remain in the Tri-City area to help diversify the economy.

Part of PNNL's budget squeeze was attributed to a DOE decision to privatize its successful and expanding program to produce yttrium 90 from nuclear waste. The bid was awarded to a Boston firm, which moved the program and the money it produced to New England.

Signing the letter were leaders of the Tri-City Industrial Development Council, the Tri-City chambers of commerce, most of the ports, the three Tri-City hospitals, the Tri-Cities Cancer Center, the Tri-City Herald and Washington State University at Tri-Cities. Leaders of five unions and labor coalitions also signed.

The letter reflects the broader range of Citizens for Medical Isotopes, which had its roots in a group that successfully fought to get an environmental study of Hanford's Fast Flux Test Facility. That study is one step toward restarting the reactor for civilian missions, including producing medical isotopes.

Producing isotopes is just one part of the future the group envisions. It wants medical isotope research to continue at PNNL, graduate training to be created at WSU Tri-Cities and Tri-City doctors to participate in medical trials to test promising medical isotopes on patients.

It eventually would like to see a nuclear medicine center based in the Tri-Cities, where patients would come from outside the area to be treated and doctors would come to be trained.

"This whole Tri-Cities area can be a cancer treatment mecca," said Suzanne Heaston, a member of the group and staff member for Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash. But, she added, "it's going to be a long fight."

One of the first steps is a publicity campaign to convince people throughout the Northwest that medical isotopes should play a vital role in treating cancer patients, despite the nuclear connection that's unsettling to some.

The group plans to meet with newspaper editorial boards and civic groups, speak on talk radio shows and, if it finds the money, produce a video.

It also wants congressional support, and one of the best ways to get its attention seems to be with testimony from a celebrity, group members said.

One of its first steps will be to start a membership drive and seek money from foundations and corporations.