A new entrant into the U.S. medical isotope industry said Wednesday it has secured funding for construction of a 2-megawatt reactor facility for production of the medical isotope molybdenum-99.
Albuquerque, N.M.-based Eden Radioisotopes plans in four years to begin production at the reactor and processing complex in the city of Hobbs, in southeastern New Mexico.
The funder is Abo Empire, a family owned oil and gas company in the state that is looking to diversify its investments, according to an Eden press release. The amount of the companies’ investment agreement, along with the cost of the facility, are not being released, Eden Chief Operating Officer Chris Wagner told RadWaste Monitor.
Wagner’s LinkedIn profile cites Eden as a $75 million startup.
The Eden production system is an improved version of a reactor modified in the late 1990s at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque for manufacturing molybdenum-99, Wagner said. The federal government ultimately scratched that program to avoid competing with a reactor facility being built by Canadian health science company Nordion. The Canadian MAPLE project, though, was eventually canceled in 2008.
Three of Eden’s five co-founders worked on the Sandia project, according to Wagner, who co-founded Eden in 2013 following executive stints at medical companies including Nordion and Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals. The team was formed by now-CEO Bennett Lee, who came across the production system while reviewing Sandia intellectual property while working at the lab.
Eden is searching for properties in Hobbs to build its facility, which would include the low-enriched uranium-powered reactor to irradiate the molybdenum-99 targets, a separate processing facility to extract the isotope, and administrative offices. It would need a license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to begin construction. Licensing and construction is expected to take three-and-a-half years, Wagner said.
Molybdenum-99 decays into technetium-99m, a medical isotope used extensively around the world for diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other diseases.
The United States has been without a domestic molybdenum-99 production capacity since 1989, forcing it to rely on sometimes unreliable output from a handful of reactors in other nations. Eden joins a number of U.S. companies that aim to re-establish domestic production, from isotope-focused companies such as Northwest Medical Isotopes to major government contractor BWX Technologies.
SHINE Medical Technologies broke ground on its production complex in Janesville, Wis., earlier this month. In April, Coqui Pharmaceuticals announced that it had received land from the Department of Energy in Oak Ridge, Tenn., for its own manufacturing facility.
Wagner said building and using a 2-megawatt reactor would give Eden a competitive edge over more powerful reactors that today produce molybdenum-99 or systems planned by other U.S. companies. Wagner said the Eden facility, once operational, could produce over 10,000 curies of molybdenum-99 per week if the full reactor core of targets were processed. That would be sufficient to meet global need, he said.
“Eden would be in a strong low cost producer competitive position,” according to Wagner. “Market pricing will be dictated by supply and customer demand. Should pricing be high and going higher, then our return on investment would be favorable. Should market pricing fluctuate, or move downward, our low cost manufacturing position would allow us to still compete in such a marketplace.”
