ITM Brand Guidelines: Garching’s 2004 Lutetium-177 Supplier & a Pending Telix Deal

A Garching company built on lutetium-177.

ITM Isotope Technologies Munich began in 2004, a date given both by the company and by a profile from BIO Deutschland, the German biotechnology industry association. That profile names Udo J. Vetter as chairman of the supervisory board, a founding investor and a major shareholder. The company is a European company, an SE, and says it is headquartered in Munich; a 2024 announcement from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) placed its headquarters in Garching, the research town just north of the city, with a subsidiary in the United States.

ITM’s own history page says it began with one product: non-carrier-added lutetium-177, usually shortened to n.c.a. Lu-177, a beta-emitting radioisotope used as the active part of radiopharmaceuticals designed to target cancer cells. The company explains its method in detail on its website. Instead of irradiating lutetium directly, it starts from highly enriched ytterbium-176; in a reactor this captures a neutron and becomes ytterbium-177, which decays into lutetium-177. ITM says this indirect route gives a product with higher specific activity and fewer long-lived impurities than the “carrier-added” method, and that it recycles the ytterbium for reuse. Its lutetium product is sold as EndolucinBeta, which the company says holds an EU marketing authorisation.

The ties to Garching run deep. In October 2024 TUM, its university hospital and ITM signed a research framework agreement that involves the FRM II research reactor at Garching, where lutetium-177 is produced. ITM’s chief executive, Andrew Cavey, called the agreement “the culmination of two decades of collaboration” with the university, according to the TUM announcement republished by the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Zentrum, the neutron research centre at Garching, on 24 October 2024.

Neufahrn, Ontario and a pipeline.

Supply is the core of the business. The company says it ships n.c.a. lutetium-177 to clinics, academic researchers and drug companies in more than 60 countries, with priority deliveries within 24 to 48 hours across the European Union and the United States. In June 2023 it opened a production site in Neufahrn, north of Munich; BIO Deutschland describes it as the world’s largest facility for producing lutetium-177 for targeted radiopharmaceuticals, covering about 7,000 square metres and raising the company’s production capacity tenfold. With the original plant at Garching, that gives ITM two production sites near Munich, and it also has staff in Princeton, New Jersey, the profile says.

Reactor time is the other half of the supply story. ITM says that in 2022, with the Canadian nuclear operator Bruce Power, the isotope company Isogen and the Saugeen Ojibway Nation, it completed a new system in Ontario that irradiates ytterbium-176 inside a commercial power reactor while the reactor is running. ITM says this gives it year-round irradiation capacity, and that through Isogen it has fifteen years of exclusive access to Bruce Power’s reactors for this work. For the alpha emitter actinium-225, ITM says it founded the joint venture Actineer with Canadian Nuclear Laboratories in 2023, to produce the isotope by irradiating radium-226 targets with protons in a cyclotron.

Over time ITM added drug development to isotope supply. Its most advanced candidate, ITM-11, pairs the peptide edotreotide with lutetium-177 and is being developed for gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumours, known as GEP-NETs. BIO Deutschland reported that the Phase 3 COMPETE study had met its main goal. In 2026, pharmaphorum reported, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a complete response letter for ITM-11 over manufacturing details, which ITM said it could address. ITM’s website now says its radiopharmaceutical business is being advanced under Lumara Bio, “an ITM company,” while ITM itself continues as a supplier of medical radioisotopes.

Isotopes and their image.

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 deal agreed in September 2026.

On 21 September 2026 the Australian radiopharmaceutical company Telix announced an agreement to acquire all of ITM. pharmaphorum reported the deal the same day as part of a wave of consolidation among radiopharmaceutical companies. The two companies said holders of more than 90 per cent of ITM’s shares had approved the deal at signing, and that it still needed the approval of Telix shareholders and of regulators; Telix has called a general meeting of its shareholders for 1 December 2026. The deal was agreed in September 2026 and was not completed at the time of writing, and ITM remains a privately held company based near Munich.

Telix’s chief executive, Christian Behrenbruch, said the two companies had enjoyed “a close working relationship” for many years. In its announcement Telix described ITM as the only producer of “globally scaled commercial-grade” lutetium-177, a description pharmaphorum attributed to Telix. ITM also produces actinium-225 and terbium-161, the companies said, and the announcement credited ITM with a distribution network reaching 65 countries and two manufacturing sites that work to GMP, the good manufacturing practice rules for medicines.

The company presents itself in a technical voice. Its website uses the name “ITM Radiopharma” in its page titles, and its radioisotopes page spends much of its length on production chemistry: the ytterbium starting material, the reactor step, the decay to lutetium and the delivery windows to customers. The phrase “vertically integrated,” covering isotope production, manufacturing and clinical development, recurs across its corporate pages.

For a design guide, ITM shows how a supplier of one highly technical ingredient can build its identity on explaining the process behind it. Compare Telix, the Melbourne company that agreed to buy it, and Eckert & Ziegler, a Berlin isotope company. For this guide we use a deep teal, a slate grey and a pale ice blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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