With Texas site, Novartis rounds out radiopharma production plans amid $23B US investment blitz

Novartis is wasting little time sketching out the radiopharmaceutical details of its $23 billion U.S. investment push. Shortly after announcing a new manufacturing facility for the class of cancer meds in Florida, the pharma giant is revealing its intention to build another site in Texas. 

The forthcoming 46,000-square-foot radioligand therapy (RLT) production plant will be set up in Denton, Texas—part of the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area—and becomes the fifth existing or planned radiopharmaceutical manufacturing site in Novartis’ U.S. network, the company said in a Feb. 25 release. 

Construction is slated to kick off this year, with the site expected to come online in 2028, Novartis said. 

The plant will generate jobs in fields like bioengineering, advanced manufacturing, quality and operations, although Novartis did not specify how many new hires it has planned. 

As it stands, Novartis boasts two approved RLTs—also known as radiopharmaceuticals—in Lutathera and Pluvicto, which are approved by the FDA to treat neuroendocrine tumors and prostate cancer, respectively. Radiopharmaceuticals target cancer cells with a radioactive drug, and they have become an increasingly popular oncology development focus, though the overall number of RLTs approved in the U.S. remains slim. 

Novartis did not name-drop Lutathera and Pluvicto directly in its announcement, though the company did note that the Denton facility will serve patients in the southern U.S. and “add network capacity as RLT expands into earlier treatment lines and additional tumor types.”  

“RLT has the potential to revolutionize cancer care,” Vas Narasimhan, M.D., Novartis’ CEO, said in a statement. “The addition of our fifth RLT manufacturing site in the US strengthens our ability to meet growing demand, building the capabilities needed to deliver these next-generation treatments with the speed and precision they require.”

The new Texas RLT plant will join four others across New Jersey, Indiana, California and, most recently, Florida. 

Back in early January, the company laid out blueprints on a 35,000-square-foot plant for RLT production in Winter Park, Florida, which it expects to come online by 2029. 

Both facility build-outs form part of the broader $23 billion U.S. investment Novartis announced last April, when it joined a growing group of drugmakers hoping to navigate the Trump administration’s tariff threats through multibillion-dollar manufacturing pledges.

At the time, Novartis promised to build and expand 10 U.S. facilities over a five-year stretch, including four new production plants and the two radioligand facilities that have now been unveiled in Florida and Texas. Novartis’ non-RLT projects are expected to tackle manufacturing for biologic drug substances, final drug products, chemical drug substances and oral solids, the company said when it made its U.S. commitment last year. 

Separately, Novartis has continued to strike deals in recent months to secure its supply of the radioactive isotopes essential to the production and development of RLTs. 

Earlier this month, Novartis inked a new deal with radioisotope supplier Niowave to get its hands on a scalable stock of Actinium-225 in support of its RLT portfolio.