In the presence of Hadassah CEO Prof. Zeev Rothstein, Chairman of S.R.I., Avi Balashnikov, heads of the Israeli healthcare system, and representatives of the Israeli Association for Nuclear Medicine, the new production rooms of S.R.I. (Specialized Medical Services) were inaugurated on the Hadassah Ein Kerem campus.
S.R.I. is a subsidiary of Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital. The company specializes in the production and development of radiopharmaceutical products and is the only one in the country that has clean rooms and cyclotron facilities (particle accelerator) that includes eight automatic modules for synthesizing particles of various types (cyclotron products).
The construction of the new production rooms took about four years, and included clean rooms and state-of-the-art systems for the production of radiopharmaceutical products without human contact that meet the strictest standards of the Ministry of Health, as well as those of the European authorities and the American FDA, and ensure maximum patient safety.
The cost of the new production rooms is estimated at approximately 13 million NIS. S.R.I. products are supplied for PET tests to Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital and a number of hospitals throughout the country, including: Assuta, Beilinson, Sheba, Ichilov and Shaare Zedek.
The location of the cyclotron facilities is approximately four floors underground in rooms with 2.5-meter-thick concrete walls, which is essential for maintaining environmental safety. It should be noted that S.R.I. is the only company in Israel that has two cyclotron facilities that produce simultaneously and serve as a backup in case one of the facilities is under maintenance.
CEO of SRI, Prof. Eyal Mishani, a pioneer in the cyclotron field in Israel who also serves as a senior advisor to the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that the new facility includes state-of-the-art production rooms built to the highest quality currently available in Israel, which meet the strict global standards of both European and American standards (FDA), which are the highest level of patient safety.
Prof. Zeev Rothstein praised Prof. Mishani’s activities in his remarks and noted that the issue of patient safety is one of the central and most important issues that must be emphasized today in modern medicine, and added that the new production facility will make this possible for the thousands of patients each year at Hadassah and other hospitals who need radiopharmaceutical products.
Chairman of the Board of Directors of SRI and former Chairman of Hadassah Hospitals, Avi Balashnikov, said that he welcomes the Ministry of Health’s decision recently made to promote stricter standards in the field Radio Medicines in Israel, and that he expects that in this issue, which is critical to the health of patients, there will be uncompromising enforcement against those who operate in an uncontrolled manner and according to the strictest safety conditions.
The chairman of the Nuclear Medicine Association, Dr. Zvi Bar-Saber, said at the ceremony that the state-of-the-art production rooms of the S.R.I. company are of the highest level and are an example of quality in all matters related to work procedures, improvement and quality control.
Source: Jerusalem Net: Hadassah Ein Kerem Campus: New production facility for medicines
