Lantheus goes Evergreen

Lantheus has been busy striking deals, and on Tuesday it signed another, buying Evergreen Theragnostics for $250m up front. The primary draw for the acquisition appears to be Evergreen’s manufacturing infrastructure; the group also has a registrational-stage diagnostic agent, Octevy. This asset could complement PNT2003, the generic version of Novartis’s Lutathera that Lantheus is developing under a 2022 deal with Point Biopharma (Point was acquired by Lilly in 2023). In addition, Evergreen has a pipeline of early-stage therapeutics, which it’s developing alongside paired diagnostics. The latest deal adds to Lantheus’s $350m purchase of Life Molecular Imaging earlier this month; that primarily concerned an Alzheimer’s imaging agent, but Lantheus had already acquired global rights to Life’s GRPR-targeting radiotherapeutic and radiodiagnostic for $35m up front last June. Also in 2024, Lantheus bought rights to two preclinical projects from Australia’s Radiopharm Theranostics for $2m, and gained an option on Perspective Therapeutics’ SSTR2-targeting 212Pb-VMT-α-NET for $28m. 212Pb-VMT-α-NET uses lead-212, a radioisotope said to be an alpha emitter that primarily undergoes beta decay; the project disappointed in an early trial in neuroendocrine tumours in November. Lantheus closed down 7% on Tuesday. 

Lantheus & Evergreen: combined therapeutic pipelines

Note: *collaboration with Point Biopharma (now part of Lilly); **via Life Molecular Imaging; ^via Radiopharm Theranostics; CRPC=castration-resistant prostate cancer; GEP-NETs=gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumours; SCLC=small-cell lung cancer; Source: OncologyPipeline & company presentations.