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The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its seventeen Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. It is a bold agenda for global social, environmental and economic development, with human health as a central theme. Even though substantial improvements in health have been achieved during the last decades, every year over 5 million children die, mostly from preventable causes, and 300 000 women die in conjunction with childbirth. Premature deaths from non-communicable diseases are increasing, and our ability to treat infections is under threat through widespread anti-microbial resistance. Climate change is recognized as the biggest threat to health in our time. When the world now starts to plan for how society and our health systems should be reorganized after the COVID-19 pandemic the 2030 Agenda could and should play a central role. In this context, Agenda 2030 provides an ambitious roadmap for development, with its emphasis on collaboration across borders and disciplines. The agenda is achievable but reaching its goals will require strong commitment at all levels and societal change on a large scale.

About one third of all cancer develops into a spread disease that is difficult to treat. Radioimmunotherapy has during the last years proven to be of help when other therapy modalities fail in e.g. lymphomas. The development in this area is fast mainly due to substantial improvements in molecular biology and in our increasing understanding of specific receptor expressions in cancer cells. However, radionuclides used today, 131I and 90Y, are not optimal in that sense that they emit radiation mainly suitable to treat the bulk tumor and not the single cell and micrometastases present in spread disease. The article stresses the importance that radionuclides with more suitable emission of particles like 177Lu and 211At are made available for clinical research and routine.

Using positron-emitting short-lived radionuclide tracers, a wide range of substances can now be labelled without their biological properties being affected. Positron emission tomography (PET) enables the distribution and metabolism of the labelled substance to be studied in different organs. By providing quantitative, locational, functional and biochemical information difficult to obtain by other means, PET opens up new possibilities, both diagnostic, pathophysiological and therapeutic, in a broad spectrum of medical practice. The development of the technique is described, with particular reference to its use at Uppsala.