NorthStar Brand Guidelines: Beloit’s Non-Uranium Isotope Maker, From Mo-99 to Actinium

A domestic answer to an imported isotope.

NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes is a Wisconsin company with its headquarters and production on a 55-acre campus in Beloit and engineering and research work in Madison, the company says. It first made its name with molybdenum-99, the parent isotope of technetium-99m, which the US Department of Energy described in 2018 as the most widely used radioisotope in diagnostic imaging.

For years the United States had imported all of its Mo-99, some of it made with highly enriched uranium. On 8 February 2018 the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration announced that the US Food and Drug Administration had approved the first domestically produced, non-uranium based Mo-99, made with NorthStar’s RadioGenix System, a technetium-99m generator. The agency said it had partnered with NorthStar for seven years on the system and on the company’s neutron-capture process. The Mo-99 itself was made with the University of Missouri Research Reactor, known as MURR, in Columbia, Missouri.

Wisconsin Public Radio reported in December 2022 that NorthStar had in 2018 become the first American company in almost 30 years to produce Mo-99 domestically without highly enriched uranium, citing the agency’s programme manager. The same report quoted the programme manager on why supply matters: Mo-99 is “the ultimate perishable good,” and about half of a batch is lost to radioactive decay in a little under three days. The agency estimated then that NorthStar could meet about 20 percent of US demand for Mo-99, and close to 40 percent once the new Beloit plant was running.

From a reactor partner to electron accelerators.

The company then built up Beloit. Nuclear Engineering International reported in July 2019 that NorthStar had finished a 20,000-square-foot Mo-99 processing facility there, with equipment being installed, and planned to break ground on an accelerator building later that year; the company says that processing building was completed in September 2019 and now runs copper-67 production and a CDMO suite for final dose products. In January 2021 the FDA approved NorthStar’s process for making Mo-99 from concentrated molybdenum-98, as a supplement to the 2018 approval, World Nuclear News reported. By December 2022 the company had completed a further Beloit plant that used an electron accelerator to make Mo-99, Wisconsin Public Radio reported.

The Mo-99 business did not last. In October 2023 the Beloit Daily News, as reposted by Purdue University’s nuclear pharmacy programme on 9 October, reported that NorthStar would suspend manufacturing and commercialisation of Mo-99 by the end of 2023 and continue its work on actinium-225 and copper-67.

Those two isotopes are now the company’s core. NorthStar says it makes copper-67 from zinc targets on two Rhodotron TT300 electron accelerators in a 30,000-square-foot building whose construction was completed in January 2021, and actinium-225 from radium-226 targets on a third, high-energy accelerator delivered in early 2023. In the company’s description of the actinium route, an electron beam strikes a converter, the resulting high-energy photons knock a neutron out of radium-226 to make radium-225, and that radium is purified and left to decay into actinium-225; the radium solution is then reclaimed as future target material. It calls itself the exclusive commercial supplier of copper-67 to Clarity Pharmaceuticals. Its 2026 fact sheet lists a first copper-67 customer shipment in 2023 and a first actinium-225 customer shipment in 2025. In April 2026 the company said the FDA had accepted its Type II Drug Master File for no-carrier-added actinium-225.

The College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison reported in November 2022 that NorthStar had worked with the university’s nuclear reactor since late 2019, including on a copper-67 project. A laboratory-use contract let qualified NorthStar staff run experiments in the university’s Characterization Laboratory for Irradiated Materials, and the results informed engineering decisions on hot cells for the Beloit expansion, the article said. In November 2025 the company reported a further multi-year agreement with the university’s School of Medicine and Public Health on research and workforce development.

How isotope makers present themselves.

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.

One campus, from isotope to finished dose.

NorthStar now presents itself as a radiopharmaceutical company and a contract development and manufacturing organisation, offering isotope supply, research services and clinical and commercial manufacturing on the Beloit campus. Its fact sheet names isotopes including lutetium-177, copper-64, zirconium-89 and indium-111 among those it works with in manufacturing, and lists a first sponsor research project in 2024. The company lists awards including a Frost & Sullivan Visionary Innovation Leadership Award in 2020 and a Department of Energy Outstanding Achievement Award.

The name has been used in more than one form. The website calls the company NorthStar and signs off as NMR, and its 2026 fact sheet carries the copyright line of NorthStar Medical Technologies, LLC.

For a design guide, NorthStar shows how a company can keep its name through a change of product, from a diagnostic isotope to research isotopes. Compare Clarity Pharmaceuticals, its copper-67 customer, and Lantheus, another American nuclear-medicine company. For this guide we use navy, a pale mist and a gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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