From the June 2021 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


The company is completing a production facility at its Wilmington, Massachusetts site to produce yttrium-90 based radiopharmaceuticals to treat liver cancer, and plans to expand its European production capacity of Lutetium-177 labeled drugs to its U.S. site.

The new cGMP suite will enable it to offer complete early development services, including process development and scale-up, CMC manufacturing and packaging, product release and stability programs. Eckert & Ziegler will then be able to generate products on a clinical scale of phases I, II and III and for commercial use as a radiopharmaceutical contract manufacturer.


The facility will be operational by the end of 2021.

Spectrum Dynamics to proceed with lawsuit against GE over VERITON SPECT/CT
A jury trial was approved in February for Spectrum Dynamics to proceed in its case against GE Healthcare for alleged misappropriation of trade secrets.

GE stands accused of stealing trade secrets and ideas about Spectrum Dynamics’ VERITON, the first multipurpose, 12-detector SPECT system designed to provide 360-degree, full-body contour scanning to produce 3D coronary, bone and neuro images, and its VERITON-CT hybrid SPECT-CT system. The scanner facilitates broad-based transition from analog to digital within the SPECT imaging equipment market.

“By stealing Spectrum Dynamics’ inventions, GE avoided years of its own R&D efforts and considerable expense in an effort to hasten the development of its own directly competing device,” Michael Joos, president and CEO of Spectrum Dynamics, said in a statement when the suit was first filed. “GE sought a shortcut to a technology that its own engineers were unable to develop.”

Spectrum Dynamics claims that GE filed patents related to the technology and design of VERITON prior to its development and launch in June 2018. It says that in doing so GE created unfair competition, and is seeking to correct the label of “inventorship” on GE’s patents. It also is requesting monetary damages and both preliminary and permanent injunctive relief to prevent GE from continuing to develop, commercialize and use these trade secrets and ideas for any other purpose.

The lawsuit was filed in December 2018 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. GE told HCB News at the time that it "observes and respects intellectual property rights, and denies these allegations."

Over 80% drop in SPECT-MPI had no impact on rate of abnormal findings
The University of Alabama Medical Center performed over 80% less SPECT myocardial perfusion imaging at the peak of the pandemic. A retrospective published in January, however, performed by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham found that the decrease did not create any shift in the rate of abnormal SPECT-MPI findings.

June 2021 Magazine

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