Business Operations

Pharmaceuticals manufacturers are increasingly turning to radioactive drugs in their battle against cancers (CNBC). 

What’s going on: Eli Lily, Bristol Myers Squibb and others “have spent some $10 billion on deals to acquire or work with radiopharmaceuticals makers,” which produce drugs containing radioactive isotopes, predicting that the technology will be effective in treating multiple cancer types.

• Meanwhile, Novartis already has two radiopharmaceuticals, Pluvicto and Lutathera, available for cancer treatment, and several dozen more in development.

How it works: Radiopharmaceutical “drugs work by attaching radioactive material to a targeting molecule that searches for and attaches to a specific marker on cancer cells. The trick is finding markers that exist on cancer cells but not healthy cells. That can allow the treatment to deliver radiation to cancer cells and spare the rest of the body from the level of damage that comes with many cancer drugs.”

• Bristol Myers Squibb sees “opportunity [in] … combining radiopharmaceuticals with existing cancer drugs like immunotherapy, said Robert Plenge, Bristol’s chief research officer.”

More interest: Though radiopharmaceuticals have been around since the 1940s, they’ve only begun drawing big interest in recent years.

• Early this year, Bristol Myers Squibb completed a $4.1 billion acquisition of radiopharmaceutical startup RayzeBio.
• In 2023, Eli Lilly acquired radiopharmaceutical company Point Biopharma and signed partnerships with businesses that are developing treatments.

In-house production: Among the key criteria in Lilly’s search for a firm to acquire: “whether companies were prepared to manufacture the drugs,” according to Eli Lilly Executive Vice President and President of Lilly Oncology Jacob Van Naarden.

• “Radiopharmaceuticals aren’t easy to make, and Lilly wanted to make sure any initial acquisition could produce the drugs themselves instead of outsourcing the work.”

Safety and speed are everything: Each dose of Novartis’ Pluvicto has a GPS tracker to make sure it goes to the correct patient at the correct time, said Victor Bulto, president of the U.S. unit for Novartis. That’s because the therapies are only good for a few days once made.

• Novartis is “investing more than $300 million to open and expand radiopharmaceutical manufacturing sites in the U.S. so it can produce the drug and get it to patients quickly.”
• The pharmaceutical company “drives doses to destinations that are within nine hours from the factory to minimize the risk of disruptions from storms, Bulto said.”

Special considerations: Radiopharmaceuticals come with unique challenges.

• One health care network had to upgrade its medical license before it could be allowed to handle radioactive materials, and “[a] certified specialist needs to administer the drugs, which are given intravenously.”
• To avoid exposing people to radiation, patients taking the treatments must remain at a distance from others for a week or more following the injections, which they get every six weeks.

Big opportunity: Though full understanding of radiopharmaceuticals’ potential may be years away, “[i]f we can be successful in expanding the target and tumor type repertoire, this could be a very big class of medicines,” Van Naarden said.