The medical isotope program at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is being cut back drastically after failing to come up with adequate funding this fall.

"I'm extremely disappointed," said David Jones, co-chairman of the Nuclear Medicine Research Council based in the Tri-Cities.

Programs that PNNL was working on or developing could have led to clinical trials for new ways to treat disease with medical isotopes and eventually their widespread use, he said.

The PNNL program's budget from Department of Energy headquarters has dropped from $1.7 million in fiscal 1998 to as little as $250,000 for the fiscal year that started Oct. 1.

PNNL officials explained that little DOE money was available nationwide for medical isotope research, money for the Fast Flux Test Facility has so far fallen short and some work done at PNNL was turned over to private industry.

"We at the lab are as frustrated as the Nuclear Medicine Research Council on the inability to get funding that's needed nationally," said Walt Apley, associate laboratory director for the environmental technology division at PNNL.

But without much money for this year, "our priority is preserving expertise," he said. "We will use business development funds to go after money next year."

Employees in the medical isotopes program will be assigned to other projects until more money becomes available.

Part of the budget reduction came after DOE directed PNNL to put out for bid its program to produce yttrium 90 for medical use as demand for the isotope boomed. The laboratory progressed from selling $100,000 worth of the isotope in fiscal year 1996 to $1.4 million in 1998.

About a year ago, the bid was awarded to NEN of Boston to use purified nuclear waste from Hanford to produce yttrium 90 for treating cancer.

The privatized yttrium program had some significant start-up problems over the summer, said Tom Tenforde, manager of the Hanford isotope program at PNNL.

Initially, too much of the Hanford waste product - strontium - was in the yttrium. Although that was resolved early on, the yield of the yttrium that was "milked" from the strontium remained too low.

However, after two PNNL teams were sent back to Boston to work with NEN, problems were resolved, Tenforde said.

Customers in the last month have been satisfied with the quantity and quality of the product and orders are increasing, he said. In fact, NEN wants more strontium, he said.

Preparing the strontium may be some of the work the PNNL isotope program continues to do.

It also might get money this year related to the environmental study of FFTF. The Hanford research reactor is being studied for a possible restart for civilian uses, including producing medical isotopes.

Money for the study has yet to be appropriated, however, although a budget request for $4 million was sent to Congress last week from DOE. If that money is approved, about 10 percent eventually could end up at PNNL for studying medical isotope matters related to a possible restart, such as wastes produced by medical isotope production.

In the long term, however, the best bet for research money for medical isotopes at PNNL may come from a new program, the Advanced Nuclear Medicine Initiative.

It could shift the focus of DOE's national medical isotope program from production of isotopes to broader research.

PNNL should be able to compete for that research money in fiscal year 2001.

Meanwhile, the cutback of the program has left angry those who see medical isotope research as a promising way to save the lives of cancer patients.

Medical trials have had success using radioactive isotopes attached to antibodies to seek out and kill cancer cells within the body with minimal damage to healthy cells.

"This is a direct threat to the health, even lives, of tens of thousands who surely would have benefited from the advanced isotope technologies our scientists are capable of producing," said Michael Fox, a member of the Nuclear Medicine Research Council and the Eastern Washington Section of the American Nuclear Society.