Medical isotope firm Shine breaks ground on new 54,000-square-foot facility
Nuclear tech company Shine Medical Technologies has broken ground on a new facility that will be used to produce a radioisotope crucial to therapeutic cancer treatments, the firm announced Wednesday.
Shine’s building will produce lutetium-177 (Lu-177), a therapeutic isotope that’s expected to grow in demand over the coming years. The Janesville, Wisconsin-based company said its 54,000-square-foot facility will also serve as its new corporate headquarters.
“Shine expects to play a leading role in supplying Lu-177 to serve cancer patients around the world,” Katrina Pitas, general manager of the therapeutics division, said in a statement. “Our new therapeutics production facility will enable us to implement our proprietary production process and scale faster than any other producer.”
By 2022, the company said its facility will be fully operational and capable of producing more than 300,000 doses of lutetium-177 each year.
“We are thrilled with our partnership with Shine,” Gale Price, the City of Janesville’s economic development director, said in the announcement. “Both the therapeutics plant and the molybdenum plant exemplify the growth of this community and how we’ve been able to evolve.”
In 2019, the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the CAS signed an agreement giving Shine exclusive rights to produce Lu-177. The radioisotope firm, which has former House Speaker and Janesville-native Paul Ryan on its board, also recently announced plans to open a molybdenum-99 production plant in Europe.
Matt joined Chicago’s TriMed team in 2018 covering all areas of health imaging after two years reporting on the hospital field. He holds a bachelor’s in English from UIC, and enjoys a good cup of coffee and an interesting documentary.