Patient impact
Every dose is someone’s clock.
These medicines only work if they arrive in time. The hours a dose stays usable are the hours it can travel, and the patients it can reach.
The clock
A dose starts dying the moment it is made.
A radioligand therapy is built on a radioactive atom, and that atom begins decaying immediately. The usable window is measured in days, and it cannot be extended by planning alone.
6.6 days
Lutetium-177 loses half its strength roughly every 6.6 days. The clock starts the moment the dose is made and cannot be paused.
5 days
A Pluvicto dose is labeled usable for just 120 hours from calibration. After that window it must be discarded.
0
Doses that can be redirected. A dose is made for one named patient; if it expires in transit, it is thrown away, not given to someone else.
See the supply-chain clock in motion, the same race told from the dose’s side.
When the clock wins
Distance decides who gets treated.
Because a dose expires and cannot be redirected, patients far from a production site or a certified treatment center are structurally harder to reach. It has already happened at national scale.
A single point of failure
For most of 2023, Pluvicto was in an FDA-recognized shortage, driven in part by relying on a single manufacturing site. New patients faced waits of three months or more, and physicians publicly warned that some men would not survive the wait.
The fix was distance
Novartis responded by building manufacturing closer to patients and expanding certified treatment centers, past 200 US sites by late 2023 with roughly 130 more planned, because shrinking the distance a dose must travel is the direct lever on the expiry problem.
The lever
Usable life is the access lever.
Hold a dose’s purity longer, and it can travel farther and be scheduled more flexibly before it expires. More usable life per dose means more doses reaching more people, in more places.
That is the outcome DuraRad is built to pursue: an enzyme coating inside the vial, designed to lower the standing concentration of the reactive oxygen species that decay creates. Whether it extends usable life is the hypothesis FabUTech is validating now, not a proven result. But the lever it aims at is the one that decides who gets treated.
- Production site
- In range today
- In range with more usable life
Why it matters
Reach is measured in people.
Behind every expired dose is a patient who waited. FabUTech is a stability company because stability is where access is won or lost, in the hours between the production line and the patient.
Widen the window, widen the reach.
Understand the field this sits inside, the problem it targets, or start a conversation about DuraRad.
Sources
Half-life, shelf life, the 2023 shortage, and the treatment-center expansion are public and cited here. DuraRad’s effect on usable life is under validation and is not asserted as fact.