As interest in the cancer-fighting potential of radiopharmaceuticals continues to grow, companies have made a flurry of investments in recent years to manufacture nuclear medicine and secure the supply of radioactive isotopes that support nuclear medicine.
TerraPower Isotopes (TPI), founded by Bill Gates, currently produces actinium-225 (AC-225), which is derived from legacy U.S. nuclear materials, and is investing nearly $500 million to become the “world’s largest distributor” of this rare and promising ingredient.
TPI on Wednesday announced plans to build a flagship AC-225 manufacturing facility in Philadelphia’s Bellwether neighborhood. The $450 million East Coast plant will join another U.S. TPI site in Everett, Washington, where the company said it is also expanding capacity.
The new Pennsylvania factory will be built on a 250,000-square-foot site and is expected to begin production in 2029, a TPI representative told Fierce. The project will also create 225 full-time jobs on site over the next three years, and approximately 500 construction jobs during the construction phase, representatives explained.
The new factory also received $10 million in investment from the state itself, the representative added, explaining that TPI considered more than 350 potential sites for the factory before settling on Philadelphia, which is close to major infrastructure and the nearby life sciences ecosystem.
Once the Washington expansion and new Philadelphia facility are operational, TPI expects to increase its production capacity 20 times and become the world’s leading distributor of AC-225s, according to a March 17 press release.
“This new facility is a testament to the demand for actinium-225 as part of a growing industry that is transforming the way cancer is treated,” TPI President Scott Crunch said in a statement.
Chris Levesque, TerraPower’s president and CEO, added that the plant will “help increase the global supply of actinium-225 and increase access for researchers and drug developers advancing new cancer treatments.”
There is a great deal of research and development interest in the field of radiopharmaceuticals, which combine radioactive isotopes with target molecules to target and destroy cancerous tissue. Nuclear medicine can also be used for diagnostic purposes.
Still, commercial success with these drugs has been limited, with the exception of Novartis, which currently boasts two approved radioligand therapies, Lutacera and Purvict. These drugs are approved to treat neuroendocrine tumors and prostate cancer, respectively.
Novartis’ commercially available radiopharmaceutical uses the radioisotope lutetium-177 (Lu-177), but Sven van den Berghe, CEO of Belgian radiopharmaceutical company Pantera, told Fiers in an interview last year: “The next revolution is coming right after (Lu-177), and that is actinium-225.” He pointed out that although ac-225 shows great promise in tumor treatment, it is not yet commercially available and requires a completely different manufacturing route than lutetium.
PanTera is affiliated with TPI. In the summer of 2023, the two companies partnered to integrate their production approaches with the goal of increasing the worldwide availability of AC-225.
TPI’s spending in Philadelphia will join an expansion of radiopharmaceutical manufacturing projects initiated by suppliers, up-and-coming drug development companies, and Novartis itself.
Indeed, in February, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant outlined two new radiopharmaceutical manufacturing facilities planned for Florida and Texas, which are part of the company’s announced $23 billion U.S. investment in 2025.
With these new locations, Novartis will soon boast a total of five radiopharmaceutical locations in the United States.
Novartis is also eyeing AC-225’s potential, signing a deal with Niowave for a scalable supply of the specialty ingredient earlier this year. Niowave also supplies AC-225 radioisotope to AstraZeneca and signed a 10-year agreement with the partner in December.
TPI has its own actinium supply agreements, including partnering with Ratio Therapeutics last June to provide the biotech with AC-225 for its targeted cancer drug pipeline.
