Nusano will bring a massive new radioisotope facility in Salt Lake City online by the end of the year, establishing a supply of starting materials for the next generation of radiopharmaceuticals.
A few years ago, Big Pharma began rushing into radiopharma. But it turns out, no one considered whether the existing manufacturing infrastructure could handle the load of new radioligand therapies that would one day need to reach patients—and quickly.
Enter Nusano, the Salt Lake City–based physics company developing a brand-new radioisotope facility.
“Everybody wants to bake a cake. But what if you go to the pantry to bake the cake and there’s only two cups of flour?” Eric Dorman, accelerator operations manager at the SLC site, said during a recent tour of the 190,000-square foot facility. “We’re bringing a giant flour mill online.”
Therapies like Novartis’ Pluvicto for prostate cancer and Lutathera for gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (GEP-NETs) are just the beginning, Dorman explained. The hope is that as companies press into the space, they may crack other cancers that are vulnerable to this next-generation radiotherapy.
Nusano’s radioisotope factory is expected to be online by the end of the year to start making isotopes to be used in early research but eventually expects to produce commercial therapies after they’ve been through the FDA usual process. All told, the facility will have 15 to 30 times the production power of existing cyclotron technology and be able to manufacture 40 different radioisotopes, some of which will form the payload of future radiotherapies. The company will be able to produce more particles than any existing facility, Dorman said.
But first, they have to build it. BioSpace was invited inside the Nusano facility in April to tour the ongoing construction. The employees—self-proclaimed nuclear nerds with a long history of research—were buzzing with excitement and purpose.
The secret sauce
Inside a white-halled building plastered with caution signs, the production facility thrummed with quiet activity. “We’re slowly putting the Legos together,” Dorman said as he gave me the tour last month.
In the control room, a quiet group of nuclear engineers watched as a test ran on a bank of computer screens. Our group waited for the all clear to proceed into the room.
A tangle of what looked like HVAC equipment, ladder structures, electrical wires and waterlines filled the production room.
Dorman pointed out what he called Nusano’s “secret sauce”: the particle beam technology, called the Ion Source. It’s housed in an unassuming grey canister, much like a power pole transformer. This is where the ions—or “surfers,” as Dorman called them—are created to start the whole process.
After creation, the ions are collected into a beam and stabilized in the particle accelerator with high-powered magnets. The beam begins its journey at about one-sixth the speed of light as it travels through the 70-foot linear accelerator, which directs the isotopes via a series of magnets along the production facility.
While testing proceeds, construction is active throughout the facility. Dorman apologized that he couldn’t take us directly along the path of the linear accelerator because the floors were being done that day. Instead, the tour headed outside to take the long way around, eventually arriving at what Dorman referred to as the LinAcc Hall, housed within concrete multiple feet thick.
“For the longest time, you’d come and it looked like we had built a concrete box,” Dorman said, explaining that the facility is designed to withstand earthquakes.
Inside was similarly unassuming. While the equipment hadn’t been fully installed yet, a massive concrete room was being filled with metal tracks to support the linear accelerator and the magnets that will direct the beam coming from the Ion Source. All that infrastructure directs the beam to one of 12 tracks, where at the end a target is placed to create and collect the resulting radioisotopes.
The beam can be split into different tracks, meaning up to 12 different radioisotopes can be created at once. The facility can run one or all 12, according to the order that day, Dorman explained.
The target is another key innovation. A piece of metal a little bigger than a deck of cards holds a shiny postage stamp–sized square. At the end of the line, the magnets allow the beam to split and collide with the target material to create the radioisotope. Dorman described the process as a flashlight shining through a magnifying glass.
The target is then loaded into a pneumatic tube like a stack of cash being delivered at a bank and taken elsewhere in the facility to head to its final destination—the patient.
A self-cleaning oven
Back in the adjacent office building, the tour flipped over to the domain of Elvin Harms, senior director of research and development at Nusano’s Engineering Test Facility. This was where the Ion Source itself was being developed, with individual pieces set up throughout the labs and scientists milling around checking pieces of equipment and recording data.
Nusano is not an R&D facility for the actual therapies—companies will need to place an order for their payloads—but plenty of discoveries are happening on Harms’ side of the world. Much of the technology at the SLC facility is new, and in many cases they are using existing technology in new ways, he said.
Harms said the test facility essentially provides “tech support for what’s going on next door.”
As each piece of technology arrives, Harms and his crew test and clean it. A recent arrival from Germany was being checked for water vapor in a massive warehouse, where each of the 12 lines were being assembled before they can be moved across the facility to the LinnAcc Hall. Pieces are turned on and heated up to burn off dust particles like a “self-cleaning oven,” Harms explained.
Soon, Harms and his team will start working night shifts to get everything into place before the facility switches on. Nusano intends to be manufacturing isotopes 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There will be downtime for maintenance of individual components of the system, but with 12 lines, they should be able to operate continuously.
The Nusano facility should have useful redundancy and better reliability as compared to the older cyclotron technology, Harms said.
Particle accelerator geeks
Another facet of the radiopharma boom has been the people. Many of the acquisitions conducted by pharmas included the talent; nuclear experience isn’t easily replicated. Nusano’s collective brain power includes experts from every high-scale nuclear facility in the world, from submarines to famed particle accelerators to power plants.
“There’s a lot of good science coming from all worlds,” Dorman said.
His own career began at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range testing the Linear Electron Accelerator that simulates gamma spikes associated with a nuclear weapon detonation. Harms then spent 45 years at Fermilab in Illinois, helping to create the Tevatron collider, a nearly 4-mile circular particle accelerator that ran from 1983 to 2011.
“I have been a particle accelerator geek since I was 19 years old,” Harms said.
But he was lured over to Nusano with the promise of contributing to Nusano’s oncology mission. “This is too important,” he said.
The development of Nusano’s facility has been overseen by many different experts since groundbreaking in 2023. Soon they will finally get to switch the power on. “This has been a long time coming,” Harms said.
Pharmas are taking notice of Nusano’s project in the SLC business park. Dorman said that companies have reached out about potentially co-locating office space nearby.
This is oncology. This is for patients.
“There’s such a great demand for what we’re trying to do,” said Scott Larrivee, head of PR for Nusano.
Previously, radiopharmaceutical facilities were located close to hospitals because of the isotopes’ short half-lives and the need to ensure the product could be delivered in time for patients to actually benefit from. The Nusano facility is located close to the SLC airport with major shipping companies nearby. So not only can Nusano can make much larger quantities—a truck load as compared to a thimble-full—it can move those therapies quickly, Dorman explains.
“We’re very much ready for the future of radiopharmaceuticals,” Dorman said. “This is oncology. This is for patients.”
