Works have started on the construction of a facility to house a multi-million-euro machine that can help diagnose cancer and that has been lying dormant at the Life Sciences Park for years.
In June last year, Malta Enterprise said the cyclotron machine would start being used at the beginning of 2023. Works have now started.
According to the construction notice on-site at the Life Sciences Park close to Mater Dei Hospital, works include “construction and sump, culvert ancillary service buildings (including Enemalta substation) for the cyclotron facility”.
Cyclotrons are used to produce a radioactive tracer for nuclear imaging during PET/CT scans. This enables patients, primarily those suffering from cancer, to be diagnosed and the effectiveness of their therapy to be monitored.
A €4 million machine lies unused
Malta has never used the cyclotron purchased for an estimated €4 million by Vitals Global Healthcare.
In March 2021, Times of Malta reported that the cyclotron was lying unused and “still in boxes” at the Life Sciences Park.
Since Malta’s cyclotron is not in use, the country had been importing tracer from a company called Curium in Rome.
The radioactive tracer has a short shelf-life and must be used within hours of being produced in the Rome cyclotron. It cannot be stored, so it must be ordered to arrive here in time for any scheduled medical appointments.
However, according to multiple sources, over the past few years there have been several occasions when the ordered tracer consignment was not sent, forcing the postponement of hundreds of hospital appointments and, as a result, many surgeries.
Sources said that, due to the limited supply of tracer from Rome, Mater Dei Hospital also imported tracer from Turkey.
According to sources, the cyclotron was purchased for €4 million by Vitals Global Healthcare, which received more than €50 million from the government to run three state hospitals in 2016.
In 2018, Vitals transferred its hospitals concession to the US group Steward Health Care after facing financial difficulties.
The cyclotron itself became the property of Mtrace, a company that was owned by Steward and Andrea Marsili – the general manager and managing director of Curium, the same Rome company that supplies Mater Dei Hospital with the tracer.
Throughout this time, the cyclotron was never used.
On January 8, 2022, the government-owned Malta Enterprise purchased Steward’s 237,000 shares – the majority – in Mtrace for a nominal fee of €1 each, according to the Malta Business Registry. The rest of the shares, 12,500, were retained by Marsili.
A spokesperson for Steward Health Care confirmed it had transferred the cyclotron asset to the government of Malta and that it “has made no profit from this transaction”. A Malta Enterprise spokesperson had said: “The cyclotron belongs to the government of Malta.”