By Neil Johnnson, Reporter/Anchor, Big Radio
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After last week brought nearly 60 layoffs and a wave of corporate restructuring, Janesville nuclear fusion firm SHINE Technologies has some brighter news this week for its investors — and anyone who has cancer.
SHINE recently has been battling financial headwinds in bringing medical radioisotope production online. But SHINE CEO Greg Piefer says the grand opening Wednesday of Casseopeia, the company’s 18,000 square-foot Lutetium-177 cancer therapy production facility on Janesville’ south side, is a sign of all that’s actually going right with SHINE.
The company plans by the end of this year or early next year to commercially ramp up two production lines in Casseopeia which SHINE officials say could fulfill the current global demand for Lutetium as a cancer therapy — about 100,000 doses a year.
If that happens, company officials say, Casseopeia will allow SHINE to become the biggest domestic producer of Lutetium cancer therapy drugs. Lutetium is believed by medical experts to target aggressive cancers without harming healthy adjacent cells.
SHINE pivots now into cancer therapy drugs, a move which Piefer says offer a surer bet toward profitability in the near term. He says the division’s launch gives SHINE new momentum at a pivotal, if tough, time in the company’s history.
“This facility has come online on an aggressive schedule, actually a bit below budget, and it’s going to to help carry the company. It’s really a foundational resource for the company,” Piefer tells Big Radio.
About 100 SHINE employees work on the soon-to-launch Lutetium-177 division, and when it launches into commercial production and distribution. SHINE officials said the company plans to open a European Lutetium division, possibly by 2025.
In Janesville, SHINE is not yet producing radioisotopes using nuclear accelerators. That’s what the company plans to do, although Piefer told Big Radio last week that completion of its larger-scale production facility, the 50,000-square-foot building SHINE calls “the Chrysalis,” likely would take a temporary backseat to the company’s upcoming launch into cancer drugs.
For now, SHINE continues research and development work at a test facility on its Janesville campus. The Chrysalis remains under construction, although Piefer said earlier this month that several particle accelerators Piefer’s first company, Phoenix, developed, are now in place in the building.
Lutetium production offers SHINE what Piefer says he thinks is the clearest path to eventually completing and launching its full-scale production facility, which would handle many of the isotopes SHINE plans to make and sell, including cancer therapies.
“It’s essential to ramp this (Lutetium production) to finish the Chrysalis,” Piefer says. “Long-term, the Chrysalis is required by this planet. There’s not enough reactor capacity to treat all the cancer patients in the world today.”
SHINE initially had intended to use several neutron particle accelerators in Janesville to make medical molybdenum-99, an illuminating isotope used in a thousands of medical heart and bone imaging tests a day. SHINE’s moly-99 division is the segment of the company that initial local investors, along with the federal government, had looked to spur to help ease a global supply chain backlog for the isotope.
Most medical radioisotopes are still mainly made in aging nuclear reactors throughout the world, which frequently leads to global isotope shortages and supply chain interruptions.
The city of Janesville has placed heavy bets on SHINE’s Chrysalis production facility materializing, with different Janesville City Councils anteing up more than $10 million in tax incentive packages and land deals. That was to help spur SHINE’s plans at the company moved through layers of federal regulatory review and permitting that took years before SHINE was cleared to build its main production facility in Janesville.
