15 percent of our revenue in our pipeline, which many private equity sponsors might not be interested in doing,” says Kiepert, who was previously CEO of the former Wellesly Hills, MA-based cancer drug developer Point Therapeutics. “I believe that our owners realize that these products that we have in our pipeline are breakthrough agents that can really fuel the growth of the company and transform diagnostic medicine.”
Indeed, new products are a major focus at Lantheus. The company has hired 20 salespeople to focus on sales of gadofosveset trisodium, for which the firm has marketing rights in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. The product is the first and only contrast agent of its kind to be approved for magnetic resonance angiography (MRA), Kiepert says, and it requires smaller doses for radiologists to image blood vessels than previous contrast agents. Contrast agents are used in about 1.3 million MRAs a year in the U.S. Kiepert estimated that the potential annual U.S. market for this agent is about $1 billion.
There’s also somewhat of encore to technetium Tc99m sestamibi in the works at Lantheus for diagnosing coronary artery disease. (The firm’s sestamibi product fell prey to generic competition in September 2008, when the FDA approved Covidien’s knockoff version.) Lantheus’s newer contrast agent, called “BMS747158,” is in Phase II clinical trials for use with position emission tomography (PET) to diagnose heart disease. Kiepert says that the PET tracer has the potential to provide more accurate diagnoses than sestamibi, leading to fewer unnecessary and expensive procedures that are performed on some patients after the diagnostic imaging is done. The CEO expects the new agent to enter late-stage clinical trials by the end of this year.
Generics competition isn’t the only threat to the Lantheus’ sestamibi business, though. The company has been grappling with supply shortages of a key radioactive isotope called molybdenum-99, which is used to make both that contrast agent and one used in brain imaging procedures that is marketed as Neurolite. The company’s main supplier of the isotope, a nuclear reactor in Ontario, Canada, was taken offline in May 2009. Lantheus has been scouring the globe for supplies of the scarce isotope, while lobbying Congress to expedite permitting for a new facility to produce the material here in the U.S.
Though Lantheus is known primarily as a supplier of cardiac imaging agents, Kiepert says that he sees opportunities to move into other businesses such as cancer, personalized medicine, and Alzheimer’s disease diagnostics. On both the personalized medicine and cancer fronts, he talked about his vision of an imaging agent that would be able to tell whether a patient would be likely to respond to a certain cancer drug. “I’m not saying officially today that we’re going to move into oncology,” he says, “but when you look at molecular imaging broadly, that’s the promise.”
