New Facility in Wisconsin to Produce Critical Isotope for Healthcare Industry

Tuesday, December 6th, 2022 -- 11:01 AM

(By Joe Schulz, Wisconsin Public Radio) A new facility in Beloit will help Wisconsin increase domestic supply of a critical isotope for the healthcare industry.

According to Joe Schulz with Wisconsin Public Radio, NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes recently finished construction and equipment installation at a new facility in Beloit to produce the medical radioisotope molybdenum-99. NorthStar will produce the isotope without using highly enriched uranium, reducing global nuclear proliferation risks.

Max Postman, program manager for the domestic Molybdenum-99 Program within the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, said the isotope is used in 40,000 diagnostic medical procedures each day.

"That's a huge number of people benefiting every single day from this isotope," he said. "It's used a lot of times in cardiac scans." Jim Harvey, senior vice president and chief science officer for NorthStar, said molybdenum-99 decays to create technetium-99m, which is the radioisotope used in health care.

"The half lives of these two isotopes are such that you can't make them in bulk and put them on a shelf," he said. "They're both short-lived, so the production has to be continuous." Harvey said the new facility will roughly double the company's production capacity. 

NorthStar can currently meet about 20 percent of the domestic demand for molybdenum-99, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration. When the new facility is up and running, it will be able to meet almost 40 percent of U.S. demand.

"We're going to have a significant increase in our capability to produce molybdenum-99, which will allow us to potentially serve a much greater portion of the total market," Harvey said. The increased capacity will help alleviate supply shortages that hit the healthcare industry in November, according to Harvey.

Although NorthStar was able to ramp up production to serve its customers during the shortage, the rest of the market wasn’t as lucky, he said. "The market suffered major shortages from the current suppliers," he said.

"Unfortunately, there were patients that might have gone without their diagnostic scans, i.e., they had to be rescheduled to a later time." At the facility, NorthStar will use a new method to produce the isotope that uses an electron accelerator.

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