- Under the streets of Vancouver,
at the University of British Columbia,
there are pneumatic tubes 2½ kilometers long
that use air pressure to transport slightly radioactive stuff
underground from a particle accelerator to a hospital.
The tubes are called the Rabbit Line
and the only sign of them from the surface
is a few manholes, and some little studs in the ground
to mark the path.
Most of the students and staff here at UBC have no idea
that a few times every day, underneath their feet,
capsules with radioactive stuff speed by at up to 100 kilometers an hour.
So, we're going to start at the particle accelerator here
and explain how: how the stuff's made and how it's sent.
And then, at the receiving end, at the hospital,
we're going to explain why.
- This is the GMP Lab at TRIUMF, and here,
we use medical isotopes and make tracers
for imaging and therapy.
So, in accelerators, we have cyclotrons.
So cyclotron: we inject H-, so negative charges of hydrogen,
and they spin around and get really, really fast.
Carry a lot of energy.
And then we extract that H- to proton.
And then we use a proton beam to hit a target.
Once they hit a target, it will produce radioactive isotopes.
And once we have the isotopes,
they will be transferred here.
And here, our chemists will do their magic.
So they combine with some injectable liquid, mostly saline.
The ones processed in this lab are short-lived isotopes,
two in particular, one is carbon-11.
And the carbon-11 only has 20 minutes half-life.
Our chemists doing a very, very fast job,
and then they send this through the Rabbit Line
to UBC Hospital and inject patients.
For the long-lived isotopes,
we produce probably nanogram range.
The short-lived one is even smaller than that amount.
That's all you need.
- So, particle accelerator upstairs makes the isotopes.
Chemists in the clean room turn them into a liquid.
The team in this room put that vial inside a rabbit,
a capsule, and into that tube.
There's one already loaded.
Close it up, push the right buttons,
and 100 psi of air pressure accelerates it
to a top speed of 100 kilometers an hour.
Now, I am not allowed to send a camera down the line.
It's really carefully calibrated.
You don't take risks like that with medical treatments.
Plus, it's pitch black.
I'd also have to send a light as well.
But I did ask if I could push the button.
It's just the big one marked send, right? Okay.
[machine beeping] [air whooshing]
That is surprisingly loud.
- Because we are sending it over underground,
soil under the road will serve as a very good shielding,
also because the amount we send is very, very little,
we're sending a dose that's actually safe
to inject in a human inside a body.
So for the public, there's no hazard.
If we drive up the street,
it would take about 10, 15 minutes.
But if we shoot through the Rabbit Line,
it only takes a little bit over two minutes.
And it's more reliable.
And we don't need to stop at stop signs!
- About 2½ minutes later,
the capsule arrives here at the University Hospital.
But that does raise the question,
when the capsule is going that fast,
how does it stop in the right place every time?
- When it's close to the end,
about 10 meters to the end, there is a vent.
So you will lose the pressure from the compressed air.
And also, the front, the air is compressed,
so it serve as a buffer to slow down the rabbit as well.
And that which allows the rabbit to drop safely at hospital.
[capsule thumping]
- That isn't the same capsule.
It's a 10-minute drive away.
The Rabbit Line is incredibly fast.
Which leaves the big question, why?
Well, what's being sent are radiopharmaceuticals,
slightly radioactive stuff that here is meant
for research in medicine.
Obviously, I'm not filming any research subjects here,
but the staff let me know what sort of thing
this can be used for.
- When this radioactive substance decays,
it emits gamma rays, which we detect.
In doing that, we can then reconstruct the image.
You can actually see how the brain works
without really getting into the brain.
A very, very important picture that you couldn't get otherwise.
By definition, they cannot have any pharmacological effect on the body.
If we were to inject anything that changes the system,
we're not looking at the system.
We're looking at the system as modified.
In Parkinson's disease,
by the time you have clinical symptoms,
the brain is already very, very damaged.
That's why we observe populations at risk.
And then, of course, we've done some studies
in psychiatry, mood disorders, in dementia, addiction.
The discovery that there is a neurochemical placebo effect,
a neurotransmitter release when people were expecting
some benefit of a drug,
even when a drug was not given.
- It turns out, around the world,
quite a few hospitals have their own particle accelerators,
maybe for diagnosis, maybe for treatment,
maybe like here, for research.
Although they do normally use a slightly less dramatic way
of transporting the results.
Which left me with two questions.
No one could answer the first,
which is why it's called the Rabbit Line.
Apparently, no one here knows.
But the second one was,
how do they get the rabbits back to the start?
- Drive it, we pick it up or they send it over.
Old-school! [laughing]