Cancer drug discovered in Indiana to power Indy Novartis plant
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowNovartis says its $100 million cutting-edge Indianapolis facility to manufacture the new nuclear medicine Pluvicto is on the cusp of opening—and the drug’s genesis belongs to Purdue University’s Presidential Scholar for Drug Discovery, Dr. Philip Low, a serial entrepreneur and industry icon.
Novartis picked up Pluvicto when it purchased Low’s Purdue-based startup, Endocyte, in 2018 for $2 billion and never lost interest in Indiana and its pharmaceutical prowess. Now nearing its debut, the plant is even bigger than originally planned, based on an explosion of demand for a drug discovered—and soon to be made—in Indiana.
The new facility, located adjacent to Indianapolis International Airport, is only the second U.S. location producing radioligand therapies (RLTs) for the Switzerland-based pharmaceutical giant. Built from the ground up to manufacture RLTs, the plant is being billed as Novartis’ flagship facility—with room to grow, as more green fields are on the property.
“This is the first facility of its kind in the world; there’s nothing even a quarter of the scale within our portfolio that matches the size and scale of the Indiana facility,” Novartis Head of RLT Jeevan Virk told Inside INdiana Business. “It shows Novartis’ commitment to Indianapolis. We have spent $100 million on the plant to date, and we will continue to spend to ensure the facility remains cutting-edge.”
Virk says Indiana’s “abundance of talent” in manufacturing and its emerging radiopharmaceutical sector were deciding factors for Novartis coming to the state.
Original plans called for a $70 million plant, but Novartis scaled up the project because “the field has grown since [the plant] was approved,” said Virk. Central Indiana is emerging as a hub for nuclear medicine with several biotech startups building new facilities for radiopharmaceuticals.
Recognized as a game-changer for cancer treatment, RLT is one of the newest approaches to treat certain cancers; radiation is delivered to specifically targeted cancer cells without damaging healthy cells.
Getting the highly complex drugs to patients is a race against the clock. Due to the radioactive materials in nuclear medicines, the drugs have an extremely short shelf life, which limits how far the medicine can travel from where it’s manufactured. Novartis says the Indianapolis plant helps trump that constraint; half of the U.S. can be reached within a 12-hour drive, and the airport is less than 10 minutes away.
With such stringent time constraints, each dose is manufactured for a specific patient and must be injected within three to five days from the moment it’s made.
“That’s a very short time window to get the drug manufactured, released, completing all the quality controls and safely to the patient for them to have in their infusion chair in their local hospital,” said Virk. “That ease of access to destinations across North America through the Indianapolis airport has been a key driver in our decision-making for why we invested in the state.”
Virk says the new facility opens the door to more patients having access to life-saving drugs.
The Indianapolis plant, expected to create more than 100 jobs, will soon swell the supply of Pluvicto, which treats advanced-stage prostate cancer for patients who have exhausted all other options. Pluvicto received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the spring of 2022.
The drug is in such high demand that Novartis says supply chain issues tripped up production in the spring; in October, the FDA said the Pluvicto shortage had been resolved and was back on track with an “unconstrained supply.”
“The level of uptake Pluvicto has had—I think it caught us a little by surprise. But I think that’s because of the clinical benefit it offers to patients,” said Virk. “These are very sick patients, and this is often their last line treatment—but it can be transformative for them. Because of that, doctors and patients have made the decision to take Pluvicto as a treatment choice in overwhelming numbers.”
With Pluvicto’s roots in the $2 billion purchase of Endocyte—the largest ever acquisition of an Indiana life sciences company—the drug continues to benefit the Hoosier state. Purdue owns royalty rights to Pluvicto and made $100 million off the drug this year, and Novartis is bullish on its Indiana presence.
“This is our flagship facility, it will remain our flagship facility, and we’ll continue to invest in the local area,” says Virk. “Our ambition is to continue to develop in the [RLT] field and use the facility for a broad range of pipeline products and applications that ultimately help patients across the U.S. and North America. And potentially in the future, around the world—all being produced from the centralized Indiana facility.”