Mayo Clinic teams with Eclipse on cancer pharmaceuticals

Photo: Jeff Lagasse/Healthcare Finance News

Nonprofit health system Mayo Clinic has teamed with venture capital firm Eclipse on pooling together seed funding for Nucleus RadioPharma, a new company built to ensure cancer patients can access potentially life-saving radiopharmaceuticals.

The new company hopes to do so by developing technologies to modernize the clinical development, manufacturing and supply chain of the new therapies.

Charles S. Conroy, an expert in radiopharmaceuticals, is heading the effort as CEO. He most recently served as the CEO of ARTMS Inc., a provider of technologies for radiopharmaceutical production.

WHAT’S THE IMPACT

Eclipse and Mayo Clinic collaborated to build Nucleus RadioPharma beginning with $6 million in seed funding. The goal was to bring the treatments to the market at a cost, scale and efficacy that would have maximal impact. 

According to Mayo Clinic, the organization draws on Eclipse’s experience creating companies with advanced manufacturing technologies, as well as the deep oncology expertise of Mayo, one of the largest nuclear medicine practices in the world.

Dr. Cheryl Willman, executive director of Mayo Clinic Cancer Programs, said the collaboration “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, Mayo said. 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.

But 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.

THE LARGER TREND

Beginning in July, Mayo Clinic Laboratories began testing for monkeypox using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s orthopoxvirus test, which detects most non-smallpox related orthopoxviruses, including monkeypox.

Mayo offers this testing at its Mayo Clinic’s Division of Clinical Microbiology laboratories in Rochester, Minnesota, and can accept specimens from anywhere in the country. Mayo Clinic Laboratories anticipates being able to perform up to 10,000 tests per week, which will continue to increase the current capacity provided through CDC’s Laboratory Response Network and Labcorp, which began testing in July.

In January, Mayo Clinic selected Oracle’s Fusion Cloud Application Suite to meet its 2030 goal for quality care and the treatment of complex diseases. The health system selected Oracle for its ability to provide a single administrative platform for enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, HR and Oracle Fusion Analytics. This includes AI to automate manual processes, analytics to react to market shifts in real time and automatic updates to stay current.

ON THE RECORD

“We are building Nucleus RadioPharma to be the glue that connects hospitals with radiopharmaceutical developers, providing new hope for our cancer patients,” said Dr. Geoff Johnson, chair of Nuclear Medicine at Mayo Clinic. “We are particularly excited to fast track the next generation of therapies, which promise to be far more powerful and precise at killing cancer, but are even more challenging to produce and integrate into trials and clinical practice.”
 

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