If Telix said that, they wont be the first to say sometimes that can leave you scratching your head. I wish someone had asked them to explain, if full, what they were actually talking about.
Firstly, its worth emphasising that this is an issue related to Pylarify (from Lantheus and Illuccix from Telix). These products share a common handicapp: short half-lives! They are never going to be sitting on a shelf ready to use at a moment’s notice. They get produced, and the question is when and how!
Pylarify (18F) is made in bulk at central cyclotron sites and shipped to large, high-throughput imaging centers.Illuccix (68Ga) is made on-site, making it viable for smaller or remote centers with less predictable or lower scan volumes.Telix is growing by targeting these underserved regions.
PSMA PET/CT scans are not emergency procedures. They’re planned well in advance because the entire process requires coordination.The patient arrives and gets an injection of the radiotracer, followed (in some cases), by an immediate 5-10 minute scan, before going out to wait for tracer uptake and then returning at about 60 minutes for a second, longer scan. Miss the window, and you lose it! Its got to be planned.
Lantheus, by their own admission, has focused on major hubs and has been slower to push into smaller centers, which is where Illuccix thrives.Yes, Illuccix is gaining ground, but Pylarify still holds the larger U.S. market share.
Offcourse, this debate is really about Clarity's products (as it should), which, like Pylarify, have to be produced centrally and shipped! The implication here may be that, 64Cu-Sar-bisPSMA will suffer the pains of being '
a slave to airline schedules'! This is not the case!
Cu64 is not F18 or Ga68: its half-life is long! Long enough to allow the product to be shipped to arrive the day before or on the morning of the planned injection. Hospitals do this all the time, with even doctors travelling by commercial flights in the evening to start duty the next morning - and sometimes, same day on the moring flight.
The US has what they call Red Eye Flights! I think Cu64 will handle those just fine!
(20min delay)