Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
7/31/2015
Perma-Fix Medical S.A. said this week it had finalized the $1 million investment agreement from Digirad Corp. in the company’s technetium-99m production technology. The agreement includes the $1 million investment from Digirad, a nuclear imaging services business, in exchange for 5.4 percent of the outstanding common shares of Perma-Fix Medical, a spot on Perma-Fix’s Supervisory Board, and a purchase agreement for an undisclosed amount of Tc-99m for its nuclear imaging operations. “We are pleased to have finalized our agreement with Digirad, which we believe will help accelerate development and commercialization of our new proprietary process to produce Tc-99m without the use of uranium,” Perma-Fix Medical CEO Steve Belcher said in a statement. “As one of the leading users of Tc-99m, Digirad is an ideal partner with extensive industry knowledge and expertise to help finalize our development.” Perma-Fix previously announced the deal as a strategic partnership at the beginning of the year.
Perma-Fix Medical recently doubled the scale-up of its process to produce technetium-99m, the company announced last month. Earlier this year, Perma-Fix said it needed to reconfigure its production process after realizing the market demand called for a larger design. According to the company, the new scaled-up version can withstand up to four curies of radiation while still producing usable doses of Tc-99m. With Canada set to stop government spending in 2016 on the National Research Universal (NRU) reactor, one of the world’s largest suppliers of molybdenum-99 and technetium-99m, the medical isotope industry is expecting a shortage in the market in the coming years, opening a potentially lucrative opportunity to satisfy the need for the medical isotope used in millions of procedures annually. Perma-Fix has said in the past that it plans to submit the necessary regulatory applications to the Food and Drug Administration for approval by the end of the year.
