Telix Pharmaceuticals and Mauna Kea Technologies are partnering to expand the Imaging and Robotics in Surgery (IRiS) Alliance, investing €6m ($6.4m) to develop hybrid pharmaceutical-device products.  

The collaboration combines Telix’s cancer-targeting agents with Mauna Kea’s Cellvizio surgical endomicroscopy platform, which offers real-time visualisation of cancer tissues during surgery. 

As part of the deal, Telix will purchase 11,911,852 new ordinary shares at a price of €0.5037 ($0.54) per share. After the deal closes on 17 November 2023, Telix will own 19.33% of the share capital and 19.01% of the voting rights.  

Australian company Telix said the strategic investment is synergistic with its recent acquisitions of Lightpoint and Dedicaid. 

Telix and Mauna Kea initially joined forces for the IRiS Alliance in December 2020, in a bid to develop advanced image-guided surgical technologies in the field of urologic oncology.  

GlobalData’s Medical Intelligence Centre shows that Telix has eight products in the pipeline. Its marketed product, Illucix (TLX591-CDx), gained approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2021. The therapy is a radiopharmaceutical imaging agent indicated for positron emission tomography (PET) of prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) in patients with prostate cancer.  

In November, Telix announced a deal with Danish company Wiik Pharma for the distribution of Illuccix, one of its radiopharmaceutical imaging agents, in the Nordics. The deal will see Wiik Pharma as the company’s sole distributor across Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden for a period of three years from the national approved date in each country.  

Managing director and group CEO of Telix, Christian Behrenbruch, said: “We are committed to expanding this partnership, which brings together the cutting-edge technologies in targeted radiation, radio-guided surgery and real-time in vivo cellular imaging our respective companies are developing.”