Pharmaceutical giants are ramping up major investments in targeted radiation therapy, one of the more promising hopefuls for cancer treatment. Companies including Bristol Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly have promised to spend around $10 billion acquiring or licensing companies who specialize in radiopharmaceuticals with hopes that technology still in its infancy will treat everything from breast cancer to lung cancer and neuroendocrine tumors.
Guggenheim Securities analyst Michael Schmidt said that any big player in oncology will want to jump into this emerging field. Novartis, for example, already has launched two radiopharmaceuticals and has dozens more in various stages of development. The market potential is substantial with estimates running from a few billion dollars for very limited applications to potentially tens of billions of dollars if the technology holds promise for a range of cancers.
Radiopharmaceuticals bind radioactive material onto molecules whose shapes have been designed to attach specifically to markers on the surface of cancer cells without damaging healthy cells by radiation. Although Novartis’s Lutathera and Pluvicto recently gained approval for treating rare pancreatic and prostate cancers, respectively, the process of manufacturing these drugs is so arduous that it is what slows down how quickly its technology is deployed into the world. Due to this, the half-lives of radioactive materials render the production and distribution sensitive and time-sensitive.
Novartis spent over $300 million in facilities to increase its radiopharmaceutical manufacturing. It could still not scale up its production due to the risks and challenges it faced in meeting the demand and thus had to use GPS trackers to ensure timely delivery of doses. It optimized its distribution network thus reducing the potential disruption.
These transactions, such as the $1.4 billion acquisition of Point Biopharma by Eli Lilly and the $4.1 billion purchase of RayzeBio by Bristol Myers Squibb, make clear why the management of a process’s manufacturing is so critical. Lilly preferred companies with manufacturing in-house to avoid outsourcing, while Bristol Myers Squibb prized RayzeBio’s advancements toward infrastructure for manufacturing.
The field is still quite young, and more research is needed to prove the wider effectiveness and safety of radiopharmaceuticals. In step with the rising interest and promise of this technology, AstraZeneca shelled out $2 billion for Fusion Pharmaceuticals. The future of radiopharmaceuticals may, potentially dictate new paradigms for cancer treatment in combination with therapeutic options that already exist, to enhance the patient’s outcome.
With the continued investments and innovations from drugmakers, radiopharmaceuticals‘ story in the realm of cancer care is one that is in constant evolution, though promising developments may bring hope for better alternatives.
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