IU Health Launches a $40 Million Theranostics Center of Excellence It Will Run Statewide

A matched gift with two family names on it

IU Health president and CEO Dennis Murphy credited the launch to a gift the two couples made jointly last year to the health system and the IU School of Medicine, which established the Tobias-Lechleiter Institute for Clinical Innovation. "Their leadership allows us to think bigger about clinical trials and provide early access to treatments that benefit patients in Indiana and around the world," Murphy said. The system matched the $20 million pledge dollar for dollar, bringing the total to $40 million. IU Health did not break out how that money phases across construction, staffing, isotope supply or trial support, and it named no patient volume or scanner count for the program.

What the program does today

The center currently administers FDA-approved agents for prostate and neuroendocrine cancers and is widening access to clinical trials and investigational agents in other cancers and disease areas. Allen framed the model as a loop rather than a handoff. "By combining image-based diagnosis, treatment and verification, we can better understand disease, tailor therapies to each patient and potentially improve outcomes while minimizing side effects," he said.

Schneider staked out a sharper position on experience, saying that other systems follow the instructions on how to administer theranostic agents safely while IU Health "helped write these instructions." Allen pointed to the same history, crediting IU physicians' trial leadership with contributing to the development of Pluvicto. Those are the health system's own characterizations. What is checkable is the institutional base underneath them: the state's only academic health system working with the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center, Indiana's only NCI-designated comprehensive cancer center, plus precision genomics and trial infrastructure IU Health says are already in place.

The isotope economy next door

Indiana holds an unusual concentration of radiopharmaceutical capacity for a state its size. Novartis received FDA approval in January 2024 to manufacture Pluvicto commercially at a purpose-built 70,000-square-foot Indianapolis facility, which the company then described as its largest and most advanced radioligand therapy site in the world and part of a network carrying capacity for 250,000 doses a year. Telix Pharmaceuticals datelines its corporate announcements from Melbourne and Indianapolis. IU Health attributes the state's 2025 branding as "Radiopharmaceutical Capital of the World" to an effort led by BioCrossroads, the life sciences group whose president and CEO, Vince Wong, appears among the launch's supporting voices.

Novartis operations president Steffen Lang made the proximity point when the Indianapolis plant opened: providing these therapies to patients "within hours of production requires precision manufacturing expertise."

Statewide delivery without a central address

Because the center of excellence is a program and not a place, IU Health plans to push administration out to Bloomington, Fort Wayne, Lafayette and the north Indianapolis metro area, along with expanded imaging capability, industry partnerships and access to investigational new drug programs. Each added market has to carry imaging capacity for patient selection and response verification, licensed space to administer the therapy, and a delivery window that matches a short-lived isotope.

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When Novartis cleared its Indianapolis line in January 2024 it also disclosed that it had doubled weekly Pluvicto output and could treat patients within two weeks of diagnosis, a supply constraint that until then had decided which centers could offer radioligand therapy and which could only refer. Building a statewide program on top of that supply turns a manufacturing problem into a scheduling one, spread across imaging suites, hot labs and treatment rooms in four more Indiana markets. IU Health says it will take patients traveling in from outside the state as well, which puts the same scheduling question on a national footing before the program has published its first capacity figure.