West Valley City is home to two major companies who will work together in the rapidly emerging medical radioisotopes market. At a ceremony on June 9, Nusano Life Sciences and Summit Bioservices gave officials and media a tour of their neighboring facilities in West Valley City’s Industrial Park area.
Nusano’s 190,000-square-foot radioisotope production facility will open later this year, featuring a linear accelerator that will allow for more than 40 radioisotopes. Among those will be Actinium, Astatine, Copper, Cesium, Iodine, Iridium, Lead 203 and 212, Lithium, Rhenium, Scancium, Selenium, Strontium and Tin. Those isotopes can be critical in the fight against cancer and the innovation of industries ranging from aerospace to alternative energy.
“Decades from now, people will look back on how the mystery of many of our energy problems and isotope needs were resolved, and they will point to West Valley City, Utah,” said Chris Lowe, Nusano CEO. “They will say this is the place where it all happens. That’s not hyperbole; it’s a fact. We’re long past just the concept phase; we’re near the operational phase. We’re lining up customers and ready to start installing equipment. There’s nothing like this anywhere else on the planet.”
Lowe said Nusano will become the world’s first fully domestic supply chain for radioisotopes.
“If we dropped some of our equipment in downtown Beijing today, it would take Chinese engineers four to five years to figure out how to use it. That’s how far advanced we are in this facility,” he said.
As an example, take the linear accelerator. The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a federally funded research and development center in Menlo Park, California, built in 1966. It stretches for almost two miles and is used to accelerate electrons. At Nusano, that same function can be conducted in its accelerator that measures just 73 feet.
“With our technology, we can open up more of the periodical chart of the elements, and do it with a higher purity than any other facility,” he said. “Most stabilized isotopes have come from western China or Russia. We can make our own here, and that’s a game-changer for the isotope market. We can make 12 different products at once to help meet commercial demand.” He also said the facility is constructed with 162,000 metric tons of concrete, seismically stable to withstand even a 7.0 earthquake.
Summit’s facility sits right next door. The company is finishing construction on a 35,000-square-foot building that focuses on the drug development, storage and logistics sectors. It provides storage and logistics — in other words, a place where those radioisotopes can be safely stored and eventually distributed as necessary.
It offers an ambient temperature controlled environment (to as low as minus 196 degrees Celsius) and can ship products as needed within a 48-hour turnaround. It will be operational later this year as well. The West Valley City facility is the largest of the Summit family west of the Mississippi River.
Both companies praised the location of the West Valley City park, just minutes from Salt Lake City International Airport and at a crossroads of major freeways, providing quick and easy access for shipments.