AtomVie Global Radiopharma has opened a $160 million, 72,300-square-foot manufacturing facility in Hamilton, Ontario — announced September 7, 2026 and described as the largest single-site radiopharmaceutical CDMO facility built in North America to date. It represents a more than tenfold increase in the company’s manufacturing capacity, with over 200 employees targeted by the end of 2026.
Why radiopharmaceutical manufacturing is genuinely hard
Most drug manufacturing problems are about scale, purity and cost. Radiopharmaceuticals add one that no amount of process engineering removes: the product is decaying the entire time.
Lutetium-177, the workhorse isotope of current radioligand therapy, has a half-life of roughly 6.6 days. Actinium-225 is around 10 days. Gallium-68, used in imaging, is about 68 minutes. You cannot manufacture to inventory, hold stock against demand, or ship slowly. Every dose is produced close to when it will be used and moves against a clock that starts immediately.
That single constraint reshapes everything downstream. Release testing that would normally take days has to be compressed into hours. Logistics must be booked before the product exists. A shipping delay does not inconvenience a patient — it destroys the dose. And all of it happens inside shielded hot cells, under nuclear licensing, with radioactive waste handling attached.
The result is that capacity, not chemistry, has been the field’s bottleneck.
The market context
Radioligand therapy moved from niche to strategic over the past decade, driven by two approvals: Lutathera (177Lu-dotatate) in neuroendocrine tumors and Pluvicto (177Lu-PSMA-617) in metastatic prostate cancer. Pluvicto in particular demonstrated the problem as clearly as the promise — its early commercial period was constrained by manufacturing and supply limitations rather than demand.
Large pharmaceutical companies responded by buying in. Novartis assembled its position through Advanced Accelerator Applications and Endocyte; Bristol Myers Squibb acquired RayzeBio; Eli Lilly bought Point Biopharma; AstraZeneca acquired Fusion Pharmaceuticals. Each of those transactions brought pipeline assets that will eventually need somewhere to be made — which is precisely the gap a contract manufacturer at commercial scale is positioned to fill.
Who AtomVie is
AtomVie was spun out of the Centre for Probe Development and Commercialization (CPDC), a Centre of Excellence based at McMaster University — an institution with deep isotope credentials, including a research reactor that has long been a significant source of medical isotopes. The regional expertise is not incidental to why this plant is in Hamilton.
The company’s track record is more substantial than a new facility announcement usually implies: over 70 clinical development and technology transfer programs completed, more than 1,000 cGMP batches manufactured, and over 4,400 cGMP doses delivered to patients across 28 countries and six continents. It also signed a partnership with Radiopharm Theranostics in October 2024 to develop the 177Lu-BetaBart radioantibody for solid tumors.
“It advances our purpose of transforming patients’ lives by delivering high-quality radiopharmaceuticals” globally, said CEO Bruno Paquin. Board chairman Kevin McNeill said the facility “continues AtomVie’s status as a leading radiopharmaceutical CDMO, now built at commercial scale.”
What the facility is designed to do
The site supports low-to-high throughput manufacturing with customizable space for future expansion — which matters in a field where a single client’s Phase 3 readout can transform required volumes overnight. A CDMO serving multiple sponsors at different stages needs to run small clinical batches and commercial-scale production in the same building without one crowding out the other.
Making the isotope is a different business from making the drug
A distinction that gets blurred in coverage of this field: producing the isotope and turning it into a dosed medicine are separate industrial problems, usually solved by different organizations.
Isotopes come from nuclear reactors or accelerators. Canada has unusual depth here — the Chalk River NRU reactor supplied a large share of the world’s molybdenum-99 for medical imaging until its 2018 shutdown, an event that caused genuine global supply anxiety; Bruce Power produces medical isotopes from its operating reactors; and McMaster runs its own research reactor. That ecosystem is why a radiopharmaceutical cluster in southern Ontario makes sense.
What AtomVie does sits downstream: taking the isotope, attaching it to a targeting molecule, and producing a sterile, tested, patient-ready dose under GMP — all within a window measured against the half-life. That step is where capacity has been scarcest, because it demands pharmaceutical-grade quality systems and nuclear handling in the same building, a combination few facilities are licensed for.
The caveats
Announced capacity is not utilized capacity. A tenfold expansion is a bet that the radiopharmaceutical pipeline converts — and that pipeline still depends on clinical readouts that have not happened. Several high-profile radioligand programs have disappointed, and the alpha-emitter field in particular (actinium-225 and similar isotopes) remains supply-constrained at the raw-isotope level in ways a fill-finish facility cannot solve on its own.
There is also competition. Novartis, Lantheus and others have been building their own capacity, and captive manufacturing reduces the addressable market for contract manufacturers. Still, the direction of travel is clear: the constraint in radiopharmaceuticals has been the ability to make and move the product, and that is what this investment addresses. Business news, not investment advice.