BWX Technologies, known primarily as a contractor for the Defense and Energy departments, said Tuesday it plans to acquire a medical isotopes business from a Canadian health company.
Pending regulatory approvals in the United States and Canada, BWXT hopes by the end of this year to complete its buyout of Nordion’s medical isotopes operation. Nordion, headquartered in Ottawa, is a branch of Ohio-based Sotera Health.
The acquisition would be followed by roll-outs of new products, though BWXT is not yet saying what those will be.
“It will be a new line of business for us,” Jonathan Cirtain, BWXT’s vice president of advanced technologies, told RadWaste Monitor. “However, what a lot of folks don’t realize is that we’ve been manufacturing targets for medical isotopes for a number of years, and we’ve been working on technology maturation with the Department of Energy for a number of years for medical isotope manufacturing. So we’re fairly familiar with this market.”
The Lynchburg, Va.-based company did not release terms of the deal, which will encompass roughly 150 Nordion employees and two facilities: Nordion’s primary medical isotope production plant in Kanata, Ontario; and an isotopes processing site in Vancouver, British Columbia.
However, BWXT said in a press release that the closing of the sale would align with a roughly $100 million reduction in capital expenditures for 2018, to about $150 million. In its most recent earning release, management said it anticipated “an increase in capital expenditures to approximately $250 million to support growth initiatives across the company.”
Nordion produces four medical isotopes, according to its website: iridium-111, iodine-123, palladium-103, and strontium-82. The products are used for medical diagnostics, research, treatment of prostate cancer, and other purposes.
Sotera Health intends to focus on further growing its gamma technology, sterilization solutions, and laboratory services business lines, “all of which have been expanding significantly,” according to spokesman Paul Monlezun.
“Sotera’s Nordion subsidiary will continue to focus on its core gamma technology business, including both industrial and medical cobalt-60 production,” he said by email on Wednesday. “The deal will allow Nordion to increase the focus on gamma technologies by growing market share for established Co-60 products and firmly establishing Nordion as the world’s premiere supplier of HSA Cobalt.”
Earlier this month, Nordion withdrew from a partnership with General Atomics and the University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR) to develop commercial-scale production of the isotope molybdenum-99 via selective gas extraction technology. At the time, Nordion said its decision was based on the rising cost and schedule delays facing the project. Monlezun declined to elaborate.
Nordion’s exit from the mo-99 project occurred independently of the deal with BWXT, both Cirtain and Monlezun said.
Molybdenum-99 (mo-99) decays into the isotope technetium-99m, which is used in medical imaging for cancer, coronary artery disease, and health threats to the lungs, liver, kidneys, and brain. The United States has no domestic manufacturing capacity for mo-99, but several companies are racing to build production plants.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing a construction license application from Northwest Medical Isotopes, of Corvallis, Ore., for a production site in Columbia, Mo. SHINE Medical Technologies has a license to build its Janesville, Wis., site and is expected to file for an operations license later this year.
General Atomics on Wednesday declined to discuss the future of its mo-99 program following Nordion’s withdrawal, while there was no immediate word from MURR.
While BWXT will not join that project, Cirtain suggested the company’s interest in molybdenum-99: “That is the largest medical isotope market in the world.”
“We had previously announced our plans to enter the medical radioisotope market with a new technology, and the acquisition of the Nordion facilities is an important step in that direction,” he said. “It’s our long-term plan to invest in the growth of the medical isotope business to include additional isotopes. The specifics of our technology is something we’re going to disclose a little bit later.”
