The landscape, as published
What 1322 parsed syntheses across 720 agents actually say about how radiopharmaceuticals get made. Every figure below counts published reports, not installed equipment or market share.
Therapy is not automated, and that is not a trend
Split by purpose, the share of syntheses performed on an automated module. Green above 60 percent, amber between, red below 35.
Imaging automation has held above three quarters for a decade. Therapeutic preparation has stayed manual or kit-based throughout, because a cold kit reconstituted at the bedside needs no module and the regulatory path for one is different. The figures for imaging are flattered by how the corpus was built - those papers were found by searching for module names, so work done without a module is under-represented there. The therapeutic corpus was searched by isotope and by therapy type, with no module in the query, so its numbers do not carry that bias.
Platforms, by published syntheses
Automated modules only, ranked by how many parsed syntheses name them. 633 reports name a commercial or research platform.
This counts publications, not installations. A platform used routinely in production but rarely written about will sit lower than one favoured by academic groups. Read it as where the published method development happens.
Who supplies the precursors
Named in the materials section of 520 syntheses.
Concentration here is real and worth noticing: one supplier accounts for more reports than the next nine combined. Suppliers who are not cited in papers do not appear at all, so this understates anyone selling into routine production rather than into research.
How the work is done
Purification, isotope supply, cassette type and regulatory context, across all parsed syntheses. Blank fields are excluded, so each block counts only reports that stated it.
Solid-phase extraction outnumbers HPLC roughly three to one, which matters when specifying a module: a platform without an HPLC loop covers most of what gets published, but not the amino acids and the C-11 work. Generator supply leads because of gallium and technetium; reactor supply is almost entirely therapy.
Most compounds have been made once
Published syntheses per agent.
A single report means nobody has published a reproduction. For a group planning to bring that tracer up, it is the difference between following a route and being the second site in the world to try it. This is the figure that most rewards being looked up before a project starts.
Publication volume
Parsed syntheses by year, 2005 to 2026.
The final bar is a part year and is shown faded. The rise after 2020 is partly real growth in the field and partly indexing: recent work is far more likely to have a free full text, and full text is what these figures are extracted from.
Planning production around any of this?Tell us what you intend to make and we can work through the platform, the precursor supply and what the release testing will require.
Get in touchThese numbers describe the literature, not the field.If your experience contradicts what you see here, that gap is itself worth knowing about - and it is the kind of correction that improves the index most.
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