Curium Brand Guidelines: IBA Molecular, Mallinckrodt’s Isotopes & a Name From the Curies

A Belgian spin-off and a St. Louis chemical house.

Curium is a young name on two old businesses. The company was announced on 6 April 2017, in a press release datelined Paris and St. Louis, as the union of IBA Molecular and Mallinckrodt Nuclear Medicine LLC. Its chief executive, Renaud Dehareng, said the new company had “over 100 years of combined experience in the nuclear industry.”

The first strand began in Belgium. Curium’s own history traces it to Ion Beam Applications (IBA), the company founded by Yves Jongen in 1986. In 2008 IBA bought CIS Bio, which Curium describes as Schering AG’s radiopharmaceutical business; in 2012 the investment firm SK Capital carved the radiopharmaceutical side out as IBA Molecular; in 2014 it began to expand in Spain; and in 2016 the investment firm CapVest bought it.

The second strand was American. Mallinckrodt was founded in 1867 in St. Louis by three brothers, Gustav, Otto and Edward Mallinckrodt, and by 1913 it had introduced barium sulfate as an X-ray contrast medium, according to English Wikipedia, which cites the State Historical Society of Missouri. Its wartime record belongs in the story: from 1942 to 1957 Mallinckrodt processed uranium ore for the Manhattan Project at a plant north of downtown St. Louis, and waste from that work was later buried near Lambert Field, English Wikipedia says. Mallinckrodt passed through Avon in 1982, Tyco in 2000 and Covidien before becoming independent again in 2013.

In August 2016 Mallinckrodt agreed to sell its nuclear imaging business to IBA Molecular, and the sale was completed after regulatory approvals, HospiMedica reported on 30 January 2017. The unit produced the medical isotope molybdenum-99 and its derivative technetium-99m. The enlarged group then counted 21 manufacturing centres, including one molybdenum facility, three SPECT sites and seventeen PET sites, with more than 1,500 staff, and a new name and brand were “currently being developed,” the magazine said.

Life Forward.

The name came first. The April 2017 release said “Curium” recalls “the pioneering spirit and radiation research performed by Marie and Pierre Curie” and “clearly states our focus on nuclear medicine.” Curium, the chemical element, is named after the couple, a point the company repeats on its history page. The release also gave the brand a tagline, Life Forward, and described the visual identity as conveying “a sense of continuity and advancement along the patient care continuum.” Kate Briant, the CapVest partner who chaired the board, called it “this dynamic new brand.”

Since then Curium has grown largely by buying smaller producers. Its timeline lists Cyclopharma and its five PET sites in France in 2018; MAP Medical Technologies in Finland and ACOM’s operations in Italy in 2019; a facility in Noblesville, Indiana, with a 70 MeV cyclotron, in 2020; M2i in Ireland and IASON in Austria in 2022; and, in 2025, Nucleis in Liège and Eczacıbaşı Monrol in Türkiye, now Curium Türkiye. In 2026 it added Abscint, a Belgian clinical-stage company.

Its products span diagnosis and therapy. In 2019 it licensed the PSMA PET tracer 18F-DCFPyL for Europe from Progenics, and on 30 September 2026 it announced rights to its prostate-imaging agent PYLCLARI in 56 more countries. On 14 September 2026 the US Food and Drug Administration approved its New Drug Application for BEXLUTRY, a lutetium Lu 177 dotatate injection, which Curium calls its first FDA-approved radioligand therapy. Later that month it extended a long-standing collaboration with the University of Missouri Research Reactor on isotope supply.

Curium says it now has more than 3,800 colleagues, more than 80 manufacturing sites and customers in more than 70 countries, and is headquartered in Boston, a move its timeline dates to 2025.

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.

From private-equity build to a US merger.

Ownership has stayed with CapVest. The company’s August 2026 merger announcement says Curium “was established in 2017” by CapVest Partners, which “remains its controlling shareholder,” and that a recapitalisation of the group was completed the previous year.

The biggest step is still pending. On 3 August 2026 Curium US Holdings and Lantheus, the Nasdaq-listed radiopharmaceutical company in Bedford, Massachusetts, announced a definitive agreement under which Lantheus would merge with a Curium subsidiary and leave the stock market. Pharmaceutical Technology reported the next day that the all-cash deal would take Lantheus private and was expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory clearances and a shareholder vote. Lantheus shareholders approved the merger agreement at a special meeting on 14 October 2026, Panabee reported; the deal had not completed at the time of writing. Dehareng said the combination would give Curium “a robust U.S. commercial infrastructure” and mark its entry into the US market for neurology and echocardiography diagnostics.

The Mallinckrodt business Curium bought has since gone its own way. Mallinckrodt filed for Chapter 11 in October 2020 and again in 2023, and in August 2025 completed a merger with Endo, English Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Curium shows how a merged company can choose a name that points at the science rather than either parent. Compare GE HealthCare, another name in medical imaging, and Lantheus. For this guide we use a navy, a teal and a pale blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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