Novartis manufacturing associate checking punches at compressing machine.
Source: Novartis
In 2010, a volcano erupted in Iceland. For Dr. Oliver Sartor, a cancer research professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine, it was a problem.
Ash from the eruption disrupted flights across Europe — including a time-sensitive shipment of experimental radioligand therapy that Sartor was expecting from Norway.
Radioligand therapy, also called radionuclide or radiopharmaceutical therapy, is a targeted form of cancer treatment that delivers radiation directly to cancer cells. While other forms of cancer treatment can target any rapidly dividing cells in the body, radioligand therapy’s precision helps limit damage to healthy, surrounding tissue.
It’s an effective form of treatment that many experts and patients are excited about, but there’s a significant catch — the medication expires within days after it’s manufactured.
A radioligand is made of a radioisotope, which emits radiation that damages cells, and a targeted ligand — a molecule that binds to specific markers on cancer cells. The radioactive component has a very short half-life, or the time it takes for the radioactivity to decrease by 50%. Once the radioactivity decays, it can no longer kill the cancer cells as effectively, which means radioligand therapy has a limited window of viability. By the time it is packaged and ready to ship, the treatment has to reach patients in a matter of days.
“It takes planning,” Sartor told CNBC. “It’s not something you just sort of walk in and say ‘Oh, I think I’ll give you [this] today.'”
Pharmaceutical company Novartis believes the returns will be worth the challenge of mastering this race against time.
Novartis currently produces two radioligand therapy treatments called Lutathera, which treats neuroendocrine tumors, a rare form of cancer in the digestive tract, and Pluvicto, for patients with a specific type of prostate cancer. They were both approved by the Food and…
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