Editor's note: A previous version of this story inaccurately stated where Niowave was making molybdenum-99.

LANSING — Of the more than 10 million nuclear medicine procedures conducted in the U.S. each year, about 85 percent involve a radioactive tracer known as technetium-99m.

Little of the isotope is made in the United States. Hospitals here typically import an isotope called molybdenum-99 from Europe, South Africa and Australia, which becomes technetium-99m when it decays.

Niowave has started making molybdenum-99 in its research and development facility in Lansing and hopes to produce as much as 25 percent of the molybdenum-99 used in the U.S within the next six years.

If it's successful, the superconducting linear accelerator company will have a major stake in the radiopharmaceutical market, which is worth an estimated $4 billion each year.

“Five years from now, our accelerators will be doing things that right now aren’t done.” said Mike Zamiara, Niowave's chief financial officer. "But the greatest impact we can make today is with medical isotopes."

Niowave's work makes Lansing a significant player in the particle accelerator industry and will help the city draw talented workers and compete with larger cities, said Bob Trezise, the president and CEO of the Lansing Economic Area Partnership.

“Having a diverse economy, especially one that is trending toward the future like particle accelerator work, means that our future is very bright," he said.

Mapping cancer

Technetium-99m can be used to diagnose heart disease, map the spread of cancer and image the functioning of the brain and other organs.

It's widely used because of its six-hour half-life, which means patients are exposed to radiation over a shorter amount of time than with other radioisotopes.

After a shortage of molybdenum-99 in 2008 and 2009, Congress passed the American Medical Isotopes Production Act of 2012 in an attempt to encourage American companies to produce the isotope here without using weapons-grade uranium.

"After 9/11 there were increasing concerns about moving highly-enriched uranium around," said Alan Packard, the vice president of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging. "Although it's moved around securely, there's always the risk that it could move into bad guys' hands."

The shortage in the late 2000's was caused in part because of issues at decades-old nuclear reactors in Canada that produced medical radiosotopes, which have since gone offline.

Today, molybdenum-99 has fragile supply chain that can easily be disturbed by world events, Packard said.

Medical professionals have been able to work around previous technetium-99m shortages in a variety of ways, said Geoffrey Johnson, the chair of the Division of Nuclear Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

They can ration the isotopes by using smaller doses. They can also diagnose patients through other scanning and imaging technologies. But nothing really compares to the accuracy and cost effectiveness of technetium-99m, Johnson said.

“The feeling in the industry is that the major sources are very old sources with aging infrastructure and questionable longevity," he said, and new ways of producing the isotopes will be needed to steady the supply stream.

Which is what Niowave has figured out.

A new method

The company makes medical isotopes without nuclear reactors or highly-enriched uranium, instead using superconducting linear accelerators to fission uranium.

Niowave is producing other medical isotopes along with molybdenum-99. Iodine-131 is used as an imaging agent and a treatment for hyperthyroidism. Xe-133 is used for lung imaging. Strontium-89 is used to help relieve bone pain that can occur with certain types of bone cancer.

Niowave's founder Terry Grimm once worked as a senior physicist at Michigan State University's National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory.

Grimm and a group of private investors opened Niowave in 2005. The company has since worked on projects ranging from a laser weapon for the U.S. Navy to cargo scanning.

“We didn’t come up with the whole idea for superconducting accelerators," said Jerry Hollister, the company's director of government relations, "but we’re trying to make them affordable so the applications they can be used for become commercially viable."

Contact reporter Haley Hansen at (517) 267-1344 or hhansen@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @halehansen.