World’s first isotope refinery project that can transform fusion innovation gets funding boost

A London-based company is building the world’s first isotope refinery, which can enable the next era of medicine and fusion energy.

For this, StandardX has raised £10m seed funding. The step is expected to radically increase production of the rare isotopes that will enable the next century of innovation in medicine and energy.

“Isotopes underpin the next era of innovation across several key sectors, but all share the same constraints around supply,” said Richard Pearson, StandardX CEO.

“Shortages are most acute in cancer medicine, already impacting patients today, and stalling progress in the development of next-generation treatments. This problem will only get worse, with new cancer cases projected to increase 67% by 2050. So we’re building the platform the world needs to address this.”

Isotope refinery will turn chronic scarcity into reliable and abundant supply

Isotopes enabling a new generation of cancer treatments, particularly targeted alpha therapies, which attacks cancer directly whilst sparing the healthy tissue around tumours, are so scarce that clinical trials have been paused or delayed across the UK, Europe and beyond.

StandardX’s isotope refinery will turn this chronic scarcity into a reliable and abundant supply. Its proprietary accelerator system replaces today’s patchwork of narrow, isotope-specific infrastructure. Deployable and built on a standard industrial footprint, each machine is capable of manufacturing the full isotope portfolio at commercial scale, supporting a distributed model of supply with production sited close to demand, according to a press release.

Production will begin with isotopes for cancer diagnosis and therapy, servicing two markets: the supply hospitals rely on today, and the ones drug-makers need to invent tomorrow’s treatments, some of which are not commercially available at any scale today. StandardX will supply first isotopes to a medical research partner in 2027, as per the release.

The company also revealed that the same accelerator platform will later scale to isotopes for other advanced industries, including tritium, the incredibly scarce fuel that fusion energy runs on: only 25kg of tritium exists globally today but tens of kilograms are needed to run just a single fusion power plant for a year. StandardX has already signed agreements with leading fusion developers to manufacture tritium to support their missions in bringing fusion power to the grid.

“StandardX began with a problem: isotope supply limited by legacy infrastructure. This raise moves us from concept into engineering, physics into hardware, and conversations into delivery,” said Ross Allen, CTO StandardX.

“Our immediate priority is our industrial site in London, where we will deploy our first isotope refinery system and work closely with clinicians and researchers to start building a reliable supply chain.”

The £10m seed round is led by European deep tech investors Vsquared Ventures and East X Ventures, who have backed some of Europe’s most successful deep tech pioneers.

“Radiopharma is approaching an extraordinary inflection point, but isotope supply simply hasn’t kept pace,” said Lise Rechsteiner, General Partner at Vsquared.

“StandardX is building a fundamentally flexible production platform that can move with the science, from the isotopes medicine needs today to those that will define the next generation of cancer treatment. We believe it can become critical infrastructure for the next era of radiopharma and Richard and Ross have the rare technical expertise and ambition to build it. Being located in London puts StandardX at the heart of one of Europe’s leading ecosystems for cancer research and clinical trials.”

Source: https://interestingengineering.com/energy/world-first-isotope-refinery-fusion-innovation