synthesis of highmolaractivity 18 18f6fluoroldopa 18ffdopa is a diagnostic radiopharmaceutical for positron emission tomography pet imaging that is used to image parkinsons disease brain tumors and focal hyperinsulinism of infancy despite these important applications 18ffdopa pet remains underutilized because of synthetic challenges associated with accessing the radiotracer for clinical use these stem from the need to radiofluorinate a highly electronrich catechol ring in the presence of an amino acid to address this longstanding challenge in the pet radiochemistry community we have developed a onepot twostep synthesis of highmolaractivity 18ffdopa by cumediated fluorination of a pinacol boronate bpin precursor the method is fully automated has been validated to work well at two separate sites an academic facility with a cyclotron on site and an industry lab purchasing 18ffluoride from an outside vendor and provides 18ffdopa in reasonable radiochemical yield 244 070 gbq 66 19 mci 5 1 excellent radiochemical purity 98 and high molar activity 76 30 tbqmmol 2050 804 cimmol n 26 herein we report a detailed protocol for the synthesis of 18ffdopa that has been successfully implemented at two sites and validated for production of the radiotracer for human use