PanTera, a Belgian radioisotope producer, announced today (11 September) that it had secured €93m ($102.4m) in an oversubscribed Series A financing round to accelerate production of actinium-225. The radioactive isotope is integral to several investigational cancer therapies.
This is the largest Series A financing round in the Belgian life sciences sector to date. The round was led by EQT Life Sciences. Ion Beam Applications (IBA), which invested in the joint venture PanTera with SCK CEN (the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre), and SFPIM—Belgium’s sovereign wealth fund, will also convert loans into €7.2m in equity. Along with €33.8m in debt financing, PanTera will have raised a total of €134m, increasing their valuation to €280m.
The deal will see IBA’s shareholding in PanTera drop from 47.8% to 31.3% but will net IBA roughly €23m in profit as a result. Following the announcement, IBA share price was up by 4% when the market opened today, bringing its market cap to €3.29bn.
Actinium-225 is a crucial component of targeted alpha therapy. The isotope is conjugated with cancer antigen-targeting elements to deliver localised radiation to cancer cells while minimising damage to healthy tissue. Several investigational treatments for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) depend on actinium-225, including Johnson & Johnson’s JNJ-6420, Eli Lilly’s PNT-2001, and Novartis’s AAA-802.
The funds are set to support PanTera’s patented photo-nuclear ‘gamma’ process which converts radium-226 to actinium-225. Already, the company is on track to produce 1.5 – 2 Curies (Ci) of the isotope annually from early 2025, a large portion of the estimated 3 Ci per year global supply. Through the gamma process, PanTera claims they will produce over 100 Ci annually by 2029, enough to treat more than 100,000 patients.
PanTera CEO Sven Van den Berghe said the company aims to radically improve supply in the short and long term to address what Marijn Kleijwegt, Partner at EQT Life Sciences, described as a “critical actinium-225 supply shortage”.
PanTera seeks to employ SCK CEN’s large radium-226 stock and IBA’s Rhodotron electron accelerator to overcome the issues of complexity and infrastructure contributing to the global shortage. As pharmaceutical companies ramp up clinical trialling for alpha particle-targeted therapies across various cancers, demand is poised to increase further.
The company has signed supply deals with pharmaceutical manufacturers, such as Bayer for their therapies BAY-3563254 and BAY-3546828, both in Phase I trials for mCRPC. It expects to arrange deals to account for over 80% of its productive capacity before production begins.
