Radiotherapy blasts forward

High-wattage takeouts and commercial launches have revived interest in radiopharmaceuticals for cancer. The challenge for the new wave of candidates is to achieve enough differentiation to justify the logistical hurdles of manufacturing and delivering products that rapidly decay.

The excess nuclear energy released by radioisotopes as they decay to a more stable state can be harnessed to detect in vivo signals, or to kill pathogenic cells by inducing DNA damage...