Prof. Dr. Alfred Morgenstern
Head of Sector “Radioisotopes in Medicine and Technology”, JRC Karlsruhe, Germany
Alfred Morgenstern (PhD in radiochemistry from Technical University Munich in 1997) joined the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Karlsruhe in 2000 where he is leading the research activities on targeted alpha therapy of cancer, focusing on the development, preclinical and clinical testing of radiopharmaceuticals labelled with alpha emitting radionuclides. In 2013 his group first developed 225Actinium-PSMA617, a novel compound that exhibits remarkable efficacy for the treatment of prostate cancer and that is currently under clinical evaluation in collaboration of JRC Karlsruhe with pharmaceutical industry and numerous hospitals worldwide. Since 2018 he holds an extraordinary professorship at the Faculty of Human Health at the University of Pretoria. To date he has published more than 220 papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Prof. Jolanta Kunikowska is a nuclear medicine as well as internal medicine physician specialist. She is currently a professor and chief of the Nuclear Medicine Department, Medical University, Warsaw/Poland. Prof. Kunikowska’s main research interests are positron emission tomography (PET), molecular imaging applications in oncology and theragnostics (radionuclide therapy). She has a particular interest in novel PET radiotracer and theragnostic applications including prostate, neuroendocrine tumors and glioblastoma. She has authored over 250 peer-reviewed articles and several book chapters. Prof. Kunikowska is a member of several Editorial Boards, including the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging and the Nuclear Medicine Review. She received several prestigious awards provided by various scientific communities, including the Gold Prize for Hisada award in 2018 and the Marie Curie Award for outstanding scientific work presented at the 29th Annual Congress of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) in Barcelona in 2016. Prof. Kunikowska has been and remains actively involved in the European Association of Nuclear Medicine: National Delegate (2008-2015), member of Oncology Committee (2010-2014), Secretary and Treasurer (2015-2018), President Elect (2019-2020) and EANM President (2021-2022).
Prof. Michael R. Zalutsky, is the Jonathan Spicehandler, M.D., Professor of Neuro-Oncology Research and a Professor in the Departments of Radiology, Radiation Oncology, and Pathology at the Duke University School of Medicine. In addition, he is Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University and Director of the Radiopharmaceutical Chemistry Laboratory. Prior to joining the faculty at Duke, Michael held positions at Argonne National Laboratory, University of Chicago, and Harvard Medical School. The author of more than 400 scientific publications and patents, his primary research interest is radiochemistry applied to targeted radionuclide therapy and molecular imaging. A major focus of his research has been the development of targeted radiotherapeutics labeled with the alpha-particle emitter 211At, including its production, labeling chemistry, radiation dosimetry and first clinical translation. In addition, his laboratory has been responsible for the development and validation of many of the most widely used methodologies for labeling antibodies and single domain antibody fragments (a.k.a. nanobodies) with radiohalogens including 18F, 131I and 211At. Dr. Zalutsky’s honors and awards include the Berson-Yalow Award and the Aebersold Award from the Society of Nuclear Medicine for outstanding achievement in basic nuclear medicine science, and a MERIT Award from the National Cancer Institute for his research in targeted alpha-particle radiotherapy. Publications based on his research received the Paper of the Year Award in 2018 and 2021 from Nuclear Medicine and Biology and Best Basic Science Article for 2022 from the Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging in 2023.
Valery Radchenko, PhD
Dr. Radchenko is Research Scientist at TRIUMF and an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, Chemistry Department with the main research focus on the production and application of therapeutic radionuclides for Targeted Radionuclide Therapy (TRT). Radiochemist by training graduated from Saint-Petersburg State Technical University (Russian Federation) in collaboration with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna (Russian Federation). He received his Ph.D. from Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) in 2013 with a thesis focused on the design of production of a promising radionuclide for immuno-PET: 90Nb. Further, realizing the potential of targeted radionuclides therapy he pursued a postdoctoral position at Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM, USA, where he worked as a part of the tri-lab effort on the production of 225Ac from spallation of thorium with high-energy protons. Besides, 225Ac production effort, he also worked on other efforts including extraction of valuable medical radionuclides from irradiated thorium targets (e.g. 223/224/225Ra, 230Pa, 103Ru/103mRh, 111Ag), design of production alternative for low energy slot at Isotope Production Facility at LANL and others. He published over 90 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals and served as a guest editor on special issues on alpha and Auger emitters for Targeted Therapy.
