Perma-Fix Medical S.A. said yesterday it had finalized the $1 million investment agreement from Digirad Corp. in the company’s Technetium-99m production technology. The agreement includes the $1 million investment from Digirad, a nuclear imaging services business, in exchange for 5.4 percent of the outstanding common shares of Perma-Fix Medical, a spot on Perma-Fix Medical’s Supervisory Board, and a purchase agreement for an undisclosed amount of Tc-99m for its nuclear imaging operations. “We are pleased to have finalized our agreement with Digirad, which we believe will help accelerate development and commercialization of our new proprietary process to produce Tc-99m without the use of uranium,” Perma-Fix Medical CEO Steve Belcher said in a statement. “As one of the leading users of Tc-99m, Digirad is an ideal partner with extensive industry knowledge and expertise to help finalize our development.” Perma-Fix had previously announced the deal as a strategic partnership at the beginning of the year.
With Canada set to stop government spending in 2016 on the National Research Universal (NRU) reactor, one of the world’s largest suppliers of molybdenum-99 and technetium-99m, the medical isotope industry is expecting a shortage in the market in the coming years, opening a potentially lucrative opportunity to satisfy the market for the medical isotope used in millions of procedures annually.
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