The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said Monday it had issued three cooperative agreements, each worth $15 million in matching funds, to companies aiming to produce the medical isotope molybdenum-99 (Mo-99).
The companies are: Niowave, of Lansing, Mich.; NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes, of Beloit, Wis.; and SHINE Medical Technologies, of Janesville, Wis. Talks are continuing with a fourth company, Northwest Medical Isotopes, of Corvallis, Ore.
The NNSA began negotiations with the companies in early 2019 to distribute $60 million in funding from its fiscal 2018 and 2019 budgets. The funding is intended to promote production of Mo-99 through means other than reactors powered by highly enriched uranium, which can be used to build nuclear weapons.
Molybdenum-99 decays into the isotope technetium-99m, which is used globally in 80% of all nuclear medicine procedures. For decades starting in 1989, there was no domestic production source, meaning the United States had to rely on supplies from other nations.
NorthStar today is already delivering Mo-99 source vessels to the market in collaboration with the University of Missouri Research Reactor in Columbia, Mo. It announced last week that it had completed construction of a second, 20,000-square-foot isotope processing facility in Beloit.
On Monday, SHINE said it had filed its operations license application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for production of molyndenum-99 and other isotopes at a facility in Janesville. The company has said it expects the agency review to last 18 to 24 months.
Niowave intends to use a superconducting electron linear accelerator for Mo-99 production. When the cooperative agreement negotiations were announced in February, the company said it hoped within 12 months to ramp up from research and development to production.
Northwest Medical Isotopes is also building its manufacturing plant, which it plans to finish in 2020 and begin operating in 2021. Chief Operating Officer Carolyn Haass said Monday that completion of negotiations for the NNSA agreement was delayed by an agency request late last week on one “legal item.” Haass said she could not discuss details of the request, but said the deal is otherwise “99.9% done.”
