Lantheus Brand Guidelines: New England Nuclear, DuPont, BMS & “Find, Fight and Follow”

A tracer maker that changed owners four times.

Lantheus is a 2008 name on a business that dates from the 1950s. The company’s own history begins in 1956, when “our organization is founded as New England Nuclear.” In 1967, it says, the US Food and Drug Administration approved its TechneLite technetium Tc99m generator.

The owners changed several times. According to the company timeline, DuPont bought New England Nuclear in 1981; in 1991 DuPont formed a joint venture with Merck, DuPont Merck; in 1998 DuPont bought out Merck’s interest and the business became DuPont Pharmaceuticals; and in 2001 Bristol-Myers Squibb bought DuPont Pharmaceuticals. Under those owners the business won FDA approval for Cardiolite, a technetium Tc99m sestamibi kit, in 1990, and for DEFINITY, a perflutren lipid microsphere ultrasound agent, in 2001, the company says.

The Lantheus name arrived with independence. On 16 January 2008 HospiMedica reported that Bristol-Myers Squibb had agreed to sell its medical imaging unit, Bristol-Myers Squibb Medical Imaging, based in Billerica, Massachusetts, and supplying products for nuclear and ultrasound cardiovascular imaging, to the private equity firm Avista Capital Partners. The magazine said the business would “operate as an independent company under a new name.” Lantheus dates the sale, and the launch of Lantheus Medical Imaging, to 2008.

The same report named Don Kiepert, the founder of Point Therapeutics, as chief executive of the new company. English Wikipedia says Lantheus today has offices in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Canada and Sweden, and lists strategic partnerships with Bayer, Novartis, Regeneron, GE Healthcare and Siemens Healthineers, citing the business-data firm GlobalData.

Find, Fight and Follow.

Lantheus Holdings listed on Nasdaq in 2015 under the ticker LNTH, the company says, and English Wikipedia describes it as the parent of Lantheus Medical Imaging, formerly BMS Medical Imaging. Its brand line is “Find, Fight and Follow,” carried with a registered-trademark sign across its website: the company says it uses its products to “Find, Fight and Follow disease.” Its about page describes a business built on radiodiagnostics that is now “boldly expanding into radiotherapeutics.”

Acquisitions widened the range from heart imaging into cancer and the brain. In 2020 Lantheus merged with Progenics Pharmaceuticals, and English Wikipedia says it also acquired EXINI Diagnostics, a Swedish company founded in 1999 to commercialise image-analysis methods from Lund University. In 2021 the FDA approved PYLARIFY (piflufolastat F 18), a PSMA PET agent for prostate cancer imaging, and cleared PYLARIFY AI, according to the company. Its timeline also records FDA approval of the amyloid PET agent Neuraceq (florbetaben F18) in 2014 and of Flyrcado (flurpiridaz F 18), a cardiac PET agent, in 2024.

The pace picked up after 2022, when Lantheus in-licensed two late-stage radiotherapeutic candidates from POINT Biopharma. It acquired Cerveau Technologies, with a tau-targeting tracer, in 2023; Meilleur Technologies in 2024; and both Evergreen Theragnostics and Life Molecular Imaging in 2025. Its product page now lists PYLARIFY and PYLARIFY TruVu, BRAVNETSA, Neuraceq and DEFINITY, and notes that TAUKLARIFY is not yet commercially available.

Manufacturing has a documented anchor in Massachusetts: the company says the FDA approved its Billerica manufacturing site for DEFINITY in 2022. Its website footer now gives Bedford, Massachusetts as its address, and it says it has been “advancing patient care” for 70 years. Mary Anne Heino, who was chief executive from August 2015 to March 2024, now serves as executive chairperson and interim chief executive, the leadership page says.

Hot cells, cyclotrons and couriers.

Radiopharmaceutical companies sell products that most people never see. A dose leaves a production site as a few millilitres in a small glass vial, travels inside a heavy shielded container and is given in a hospital’s nuclear-medicine department. So the industry’s pictures tend to show the places and machines around the product rather than the product itself.

The factory pictures are the most distinctive. Annual reports and websites in this field often show hot cells, the lead-shielded workstations where technicians handle radioactive material through thick windows and manipulator arms, and robotic dispensing systems that fill vials behind glass. Cyclotrons appear as large circular machines in bare concrete rooms, and research reactors are often photographed from above the pool, where the water glows blue around the core.

The second set of pictures comes from the scan itself. PET and SPECT images, usually shown in bright false colour over a grey outline of the body, are the clearest way to show what a tracer is for, and they recur in product pages, investor slides and congress booths. Alongside them sit images of time: couriers, vans and aircraft, because many isotopes decay within hours. Fluorine-18 has a half-life of about 110 minutes and technetium-99m about six hours, so supply chains are drawn as networks of sites and routes.

The trade meets at a small number of congresses, chiefly the annual meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) in North America and the congress of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) in Europe, where booths, posters and product launches set much of the year’s visual language. This guide records what can be checked about each company’s history and ownership, and marks what rests only on its own word.

A pending merger with Curium.

Lantheus’ independence may be ending. On 3 August 2026 the company and Curium US Holdings, part of the Boston-based nuclear-medicine group Curium, announced a definitive agreement under which Lantheus would merge with a Curium subsidiary. The release said the Lantheus board had approved the deal unanimously and that, until closing, Lantheus would continue to operate as an independent, publicly traded company. Pharmaceutical Technology reported on 4 August 2026 that the all-cash deal would take the Nasdaq-listed company private and was expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory clearances and shareholder approval.

Shareholders approved the merger agreement at a special meeting on 14 October 2026, Panabee reported. The merger had not completed at the time of writing. Part of the price to Lantheus shareholders takes the form of contingent value rights, tied to commercial milestones for three product groups through 2030: its prostate cancer diagnostics, its neurology diagnostics and the DEFINITY business, the release said. In the same announcement Curium described Lantheus as having “pioneered the radiodiagnostics landscape in the U.S. for 70 years.” Heino said the deal was “the ultimate validation of what the Lantheus team has built over seven decades,” and Curium’s chief executive said it would bring Curium a US commercial base and its first US products in neurology and echocardiography.

For a design guide, Lantheus shows how a long chain of owners can sit behind a short name and a three-verb slogan. Compare Curium, its intended partner, and Siemens Healthineers, another name in medical imaging. For this guide we use a plum, a coral and a blush pink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Lantheus’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.