A London-based company is building the world’s first isotope refinery, which can enable the next era of medicine and fusion energy.

For this, StandardX has raised £10m seed funding. The step is expected to radically increase production of the rare isotopes that will enable the next century of innovation in medicine and energy.

“Isotopes underpin the next era of innovation across several key sectors, but all share the same constraints around supply,” said Richard Pearson, StandardX CEO.

“Shortages are most acute in cancer medicine, already impacting patients today, and stalling progress in the development of next-generation treatments. This problem will only get worse, with new cancer cases projected to increase 67% by 2050. So we’re building the platform the world needs to address this.”

Isotopes enabling a new generation of cancer treatments, particularly targeted alpha therapies, which attacks cancer directly whilst sparing the healthy tissue around tumours, are so scarce that clinical trials have been paused or delayed across the UK, Europe and beyond.

StandardX’s isotope refinery will turn this chronic scarcity into a reliable and abundant supply. Its proprietary accelerator system replaces today’s patchwork of narrow, isotope-specific infrastructure. Deployable and built on a standard industrial footprint, each machine is capable of manufacturing the full isotope portfolio at commercial scale, supporting a distributed model of supply with production sited close to demand, according to a press release. Production will begin with isotopes for cancer diagnosis and therapy, servicing two markets: the supply hospitals rely on today, and the ones drug-makers need to invent tomorrow’s treatments, some of which are not commercially available at any scale today.

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