M&A Award winner PanTera raised 134 million euros to lead the next generation of cancer therapies.
Isotope producer PanTera has raised enough money to construct its state-of-the-art facility for producing actinium-225 (225Ac) in Mol, Belgium, which will be pivotal in providing Targeted Alpha-particle Therapy (TAT) – a promising new approach to cancer treatment.
This follows the company’s successful completion of an unprecedented 93 million euros Series A funding round, as well as securing a binding term sheet for 33.8 million euros in debt with KBC and Belfius (supported by Gigarant, a guarantee instrument of the Flemish Government).
Alongside this, IBA, the world leader in particle accelerator technology, and SFPIM, a Belgian sovereign fund, converted 7.2 million euros in convertible loans into equity, bringing the total amount raised to 134 million euros.
The new facility will allow PanTera to produce more than 100 Curies (Ci) of clinical-grade 225Ac annually by 2029, meeting rapidly increasing demands as the pharmaceutical industry realises its potential in treating cancer. In 2024, for example, major pharmaceutical companies (such as Bristol Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, Novartis and Eli Lilly) collectively invested more than 8 billion euros in acquisitions of targets in the nuclear medicine sector to leverage advanced imaging techniques and targeted therapies, which promise more precise and effective patient care.
This resulted in the oversubscription of PanTera’s funding round, making it the largest Series A deal Belgium’s life sciences sector has ever seen. The sheer magnitude and oversubscription of the funding round led to PanTera receiving the recognition for Best Venture Capital Deal in the Life Sciences category at the 2024 M&A Awards in Belgium.
As a scientist, Sven Van den Berghe, CEO of PanTera, says he is used to getting recognised for his research and publications, so getting recognition for making a financial deal feels foreign to him. “You need to be able to convince people and bring evidence to the table that what you’re doing is worth their investment, which is something scientists are sometimes not good at”, he explains. “It’s comforting to know our approach of transparency and honesty, in combination with the great assets we have access to, was convincing.”
Identifying the ideal investor
When PanTera started looking into venture capital opportunities, they realised they would need some help. “It was the first time we had done something at this scale, and we wanted to do it right, so we went to KBC Securities , a Belgian investment banker”, Van den Berghe shares.
KBC Securities started coaching the PanTera team, helping them prepare all the information they needed, challenging them by asking a lot of questions the team hadn’t expected, and supporting their pitches to the investors. “We practised and perfected the pitch by repeating the same presentation over 35 times”, Van den Berghe reminisces.
Despite the oversubscription, PanTera had challenges finding its place with investors initially. Because its ambition is only to produce isotopes, not pharmaceuticals, it requires an investment in infrastructure and doesn’t quite fall naturally under biotech or life sciences. “This made it difficult for analysts to find a space for us within the scope of their investment portfolios, even if they liked the opportunity”, Van den Berghe explains. However, when they approached EQT Life Sciences’ fund manager, PanTera’s luck changed. “We might not have a box for you, but we’re interested in your story because it is vital for all the other stuff we’re doing, so we’re creating a box for you”, he summarises the fund manager’s attitude.
“That was really the breakthrough”, Van den Berghe notes. “Once a highly reputed investor like EQT shows interest and has done the due diligence, it creates a lemming behaviour among other investors.”
But they had already found their match in EQT (with Kurma Partners, Eurazeo, Korys, Paladin, Wallonie Entreprendre and PMV as follow-on investors) and had to turn away the oversubscribed investors. “I liked how EQT looks at their investments in their life science fund. They have a lot of experience and we feel like they are there to support the company, not just chase returns.”
Another important aspect of the deal was that PanTera wanted to be fully funded from the onset of the deal. “In the biotech and life sciences industries, you typically find funding based on phases of your projects. But because this is an infrastructure project to a large degree and we have a lot more collateral to set up, we knew we needed to approach this as a one-time investment”, the CEO of PanTera explains. “The natural choice was to distribute the whole investment deal between debt and equity.”
He also needed to look at how PanTera would evolve into the future. “This could become an evergreen story, in which the current investors can still exit but transition into a continuous growth fund. The fact that EQT and Kurma Partners/Eurazeo both have these opportunities in their portfolio was a big draw factor”, he says. “On the other hand, PanTera is also open to other scenarios, such as an IPO or we may get acquired by pharma. All shareholders needed to be open to such a future for the company as well”, he adds.
And, by luck, there was an immediate chemistry between the three C-suite members of the company, including Van den Berghe, the CTO Samy Bertrand, and the CBO Christophe Malice. “Stephen Covey’s The Speed of Trust is my leadership bible. It outlines 13 behaviours of high trust that have never failed me”, the PanTera leader recommends, explaining that he used these behaviours to build trust in a very short time.
Leveraging local experience
While it wasn’t intentional, all of the investors turned out to be European. Their local experience will be beneficial for PanTera’s operations in Belgium. “Isotope production and Belgium are tightly linked, with the BR2 reactor at the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre producing about 25 percent of all reactor-based radioisotopes in the world for medical purposes”, he shares.
Linked to the high interest in radium for medical (and other) applications and the availability of uranium ore from its colony, Belgium was the centre of the radium trade at the beginning of the 20th century. Although the interest in radium reduced markedly in the 1930’s, Van den Berghe explains that, in the late 1960s, Europe wanted a power source for their space race, and decided actinium-227 (227Ac) was the right isotope. To produce 227Ac, you need a reactor, a deep knowledge of radiochemistry and large quantities of radium. All these ingredients were present in Belgium and a production was launched at the National Nuclear Research Centre SCK CEN. In the early 1970s, the programme was shut down as Europe decided not to go through with the 227Ac. The actinium was stored and sold to the Norwegian company Algeta, eventually ending up at Bayer. “This was the basis for Xofigo, one of the first radiotherapeutic applications”, he says.
“After the 227Ac project was stopped, the radium used in the production was stored at SCK CEN. This is the reason why, today still, SCK CEN is one of the few organisations globally with large quantities of high-quality and pure radium. This radium will be used again to produce 225Ac, this time not using a reactor, but an accelerator.”
PanTera was born in 2022 as a 50/50 joint venture between IBA, a world-leading company when it comes to particle accelerators, and SCK CEN, who had by then already spent three years in joint R&D to prepare the venture. The radium used to manufacture the 227Ac has been contributed to PanTera’s assets by SCK CEN. IBA has a specific accelerator uniquely suited to produce the type of particles and beams PanTera is using, which they contributed to the company. “So our ties to Belgium and Europe are quite important for us to maintain”, Sven circles back.
The company also leveraged local expertise to help them navigate the regulatory landscape of their unique venture. “We are working in two regulatory environments: pharmaceutical and nuclear”, he adds. “None of us have large experience in the pharmaceutical space, because we don’t deliver a drug product, so we decided from the beginning that we would involve people specialised in GMP and quality.”
This turned out to be a very good decision, as it is often an afterthought in the isotope production industry. “It’s all good and well to have an awesome nuclear product, but you have to respect pharmaceutical law in your design too”, Van den Berghe notes.
Then there’s also nuclear regulation, which is often perceived as an important risk by those who are not familiar with it. In particular, regulators rarely still have experience with activities involving large amounts of radium. “An advantage of being in Belgium is that all the regulators are well-educated and also somewhat pragmatic about the realities of nuclear”, he says. “SCK CEN have a very close relationship with the regulators as they have to work with them on a regular basis, which also helps.”
Planning for the future
One of the biggest risks of operating in the nuclear space currently is the potential impact on companies’ reputations, especially as it relates to their environmental and social responsibility. But PanTera isn’t too concerned, as its unique and patented photo-nuclear gamma production process transforms its radium-226 (226Ra) into radium-225 (225Ra), which subsequently decays into 225Ac. This process ensures a reliable, safe, and high-quality supply of 225Ac, which is critical for both clinical trials and future commercial radiopharmaceutical therapies.
“It’s about reusing sources of nuclear material that were previously considered as waste and not producing any new waste”, Van den Berghe says. “Our process has always been aimed at minimising the loss of 226Ra and the amount that ends up in our waste, with a targeted recovery rate of 99.9%. This means we’ll never need additional radium.” In addition to the environmental impact of the circular economy, the potential 225Ac has for cancer treatments will also be beneficial for humankind.
PanTera is set to start construction of the production facility in September of this year (2025). “We have submitted the request for a construction license, the designs are all done, and we either already have or placed orders for the components we need”, he says. “By 2029, we want to be operational at full capacity.”
The company’s immediate focus is demonstrating credibility to the market. “The reason why we haven’t promised it will be ready sooner is because we believe it takes time to ensure quality and dependability. While many other competitors have provided earlier timelines, their constant delay has resulted in less credibility and their focus on delivering their first 225Ac fast, has decreased their attention to detail, creating a risk for their sustainability and reliability of supply. Our transparency has put us in a leading position in terms of gaining the market’s trust”, he explains.
PanTera also considers it important to start supplying 225Ac to the market as soon as possible, but has opted to follow a different production route in a collaboration approach for its “early supply”. The CEO of PanTera explains: “Through its agreement with TerraPower, PanTera has access to a quantity of thorium-229 (229Th), an isotope which decays to 225Ra and then to 225Ac in a generator.” Setting up these generators requires a nuclear infrastructure, which PanTera is renting from SCK CEN and to provide actinium in GMP quality, PanTera has set up a modular clean room for the final purification steps, dispensing and quality control of its product.“
Today, PanTera is finalising this production line and will start supplying up to 150mCi of 225Ac per month to a variety of clients in the coming months. Because both this Early Supply product and the future “commercial supply” product result from the decay of 225Ra, PanTera expects the quality of both products to be very comparable and a smooth transition for pharma between suppliers using both production routes,” he mentions.
In the longer term, PanTera is working on an internationalisation strategy, which could very well result in more funding rounds like this one.
Read also: How a Belgian cybersecurity start-up scored a record venture capital deal
