Greetings AMIC!
AMIC aims to enable transformative innovations and align with its core principle of serving the community through intellectual capital. In another collaborative effort to engage with industry, AMIC Director Xiujuan Jane Zhang, UW-Madison’s College of Engineering Office of Corporate Relations Director Russ Johnson, and UW-Madison’s Nuclear Reactor Director Bob Agasie visited the Beloit, Wisconsin headquarters of AMIC member company, NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes.
Dr. Daniel De Vries, NorthStar’s Director of Medical Radioisotope Product Development, and colleagues welcomed our team and led an informative tour of NorthStar’s state-of-the-art facility, which will utilize an electron accelerator to produce non-carrier added (n.c.a.) actinium-225 (Ac-225). Ac-225 is an alpha emitter shown to be effective in targeting and killing cancer cells. NorthStar’s sustainable approach, in which no stable elements are added to the process, generates a high-energy electron beam that are converted into photons to knock out a neutron from radium-226 (Ra-226), the precursor to radium-225 (Ra-225) and parent of Ac-225.
While continuing to ramp up its activities in the electron accelerator facility, NorthStar wishes to strengthen its collaboration with UW-Madison’s Nuclear Reactor Facility. In doing so, NorthStar will advance its R&D efforts to transition and commercially produce Ac-225 that, when combined with small protein molecules or monoclonal antibodies, will provide cancer patients access to game-changing radiopharmaceuticals. This ongoing relationship embodies the Wisconsin Idea by combining university research resources and industrial capabilities to deliver products and services that benefit society, which is the principal mission of our Wisconsin MRSEC/AMIC.
Our team in front of NorthStar’s electron accelerator at their Ac-225 production facility in Beloit, Wisconsin. Photo courtesy of NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes.
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