What You Should Know:
– Eclipse, a venture capital firm investing in the digital transformation of the world’s physical industries, and Mayo Clinic, a leading nonprofit health organization, recently announced the creation and seed funding of Nucleus RadioPharma, a new company built to ensure cancer patients can access potentially life-saving radiopharmaceuticals by developing technologies to modernize the clinical development, manufacturing, and supply chain of these promising new therapies.
– The founding Board of Directors is comprised of Manu Nair, Chair of Corporate Development at Mayo Clinic; Justin Butler, Partner at Eclipse; Mary Kate Wold, Chief Executive Officer and President of the Church Pension Group and a former senior executive at Wyeth; Ned Sharpless, M.D., former Director of the National Cancer Institute and former Acting Commissioner of the FDA; and Mike Rossi, former head of radioligand therapy and imaging at Novartis.
Developing Technologies to Usher in a New Era in Radiopharmaceutical Development
With over $2.7 billion in assets under management, 70-plus portfolio companies, and a team of investors with deep operating expertise in technology, manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, healthcare and consumer products, Eclipse is a leading U.S. venture capital firm. Its leadership team has the experience necessary to create and scale complex operations.
Eclipse and Mayo Clinic collaborated to build Nucleus RadioPharma, beginning with $6 million in seed funding, to bring these treatments to the market at a cost, scale, and efficacy that will impact millions of lives. The organization draws on Eclipse’s experience creating companies with advanced manufacturing technologies, as well as the deep oncology expertise of Mayo Clinic, one of the largest nuclear medicine practices in the world.
“Mayo Clinic is on a mission to transform our cancer care practice by integrating research with clinical care to ensure that every patient we serve, across the U.S. and the world, has access to state-of-the-art cancer clinical trials and the newest treatments. We believe that radiopharmaceuticals are highly innovative new therapies with tremendous potential to help cancer patients,” said Cheryl Willman, M.D., Executive Director of Mayo Clinic Cancer Programs. “The collaboration with Nucleus RadioPharma will provide enhanced manufacturing capabilities so Mayo Clinic can rapidly deliver radiopharmaceuticals, empowering us to better serve our patients today, and enabling the development and clinical testing of novel targeted radiotherapies in the future.”
Radiopharmaceuticals are poised to become a core modality of cancer diagnosis, staging and treatment, but their success has been broadly hampered by manufacturing and supply chain issues. The treatments are expensive and have short-lived radioactivity, which means they must be produced daily, often in small batches, and sometimes even individually for each patient. However, after a patient is approved to receive a radiotherapy, current supply chain limitations mean that some patients must wait more than a month for the treatment to be manufactured and delivered to the hospital
“New therapeutic modalities, such as radiopharmaceuticals require new infrastructure to unlock their full potential,” said Justin Butler, Partner at Eclipse. “Together with Mayo Clinic, we are leveraging our combined expertise in clinical development, manufacturing, and supply chain to evolve and enhance the radiopharmaceutical industry, allowing drug developers to access larger markets more quickly.”
