BWXT Medical
A Canadian company, owned by the US nuclear firm BWXT, that is building a made-in-Canada supply of the technetium generators hospitals use for the vast majority of nuclear medicine scans, plus other isotopes and radiotherapy hardware.
Overview
BWXT Medical Ltd. is the nuclear medicine subsidiary of BWX Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: BWXT), operating manufacturing and processing facilities in Ottawa and Vancouver, Canada. Its central programme is a proprietary route to molybdenum-99 (Mo-99), the parent isotope of technetium-99m (Tc-99m), the radionuclide used in roughly 80% of nuclear medicine procedures worldwide. Rather than irradiating enriched-uranium targets in a research reactor, BWXT's approach irradiates natural molybdenum targets in an operating commercial power reactor: since 2018/2019 it has worked with Ontario Power Generation and its subsidiary Laurentis Energy Partners to install a Target Delivery System (TDS) at OPG's Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, making Darlington the first commercial power reactor in the world to produce Mo-99. The Mo-99 is processed at BWXT Medical's Ottawa facility into proprietary Tc-99m generators intended as drop-in replacements for existing hospital and radiopharmacy generators, pending FDA and Health Canada approval; a February 2023 milestone confirmed installation and initial commissioning of the isotope system at Darlington.
BWXT Medical's isotope portfolio extends beyond Mo-99/Tc-99m: industry directory material describes it as also handling actinium-225, indium-111, iodine-123, strontium-82 and germanium-68, and as pursuing cobalt-60 production at Darlington (alongside existing extraction at OPG's Pickering station). The company is also the exclusive contract manufacturer, outside China, of TheraSphere (yttrium-90 glass microspheres for radioembolisation) in partnership with Boston Scientific, and has worked with Laurentis on scalable production infrastructure at Darlington intended to support lutetium-177 as well as Mo-99.
As a large, reactor-adjacent contract manufacturer, BWXT Medical sits in the therapeutic and diagnostic isotope supply chain alongside other Mo-99/Tc-99m producers (Curium, NTP Radioisotopes, ANSTO) and complements Boston Scientific's radioembolisation device business through its TheraSphere manufacturing role.
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