Today, the Eclipse team is excited to announce the creation and funding of Nucleus Radiopharma. It is a new company we’ve built with Mayo Clinic to ensure cancer patients can access potentially life-saving radiopharmaceuticals by developing technologies to modernize the clinical development, manufacturing, and supply chain of these critical therapies.
We were inspired to start this company for a simple reason: targeted radiopharmaceuticals are providing life changing results, but are only reaching a fraction of eligible patients due to manufacturing and supply chain issues. These new therapies are showing great promise for patients as they have the ability to precisely target and kill tumors, while sparing healthy cells and with minimal side effects. However, they also have complex raw material streams, specialized manufacturing methods, and short-lived radioactivity, which means they must be produced daily, often in small batches, and usually on a patient-by-patient basis. Patients currently sit on waitlists for these therapies for weeks or months, assuming they have access to a qualified center at all.
Drawing from Eclipse’s experience creating companies with advanced manufacturing technologies, as well as the deep oncology expertise of Mayo Clinic, Nucleus will partner with the pharmaceutical industry to bring these treatments to the market at a cost, scale, and efficacy that will impact millions of people’s lives. It is clear that we can’t manufacture new therapeutic modalities, such as radiopharmaceuticals, via traditional pharmaceutical manufacturing techniques. These modalities require new infrastructure to unlock their full potential. With the creation of Nucleus, for the first time, a single company will provide the radiopharma industry clinical operations support, full end-to-end manufacturing capabilities, and supply chain fulfillment from clinical trials to commercial deployment.
These audacious goals cannot be achieved without the world-class team we have assembled. Charles Conroy, one of the world’s leading experts in radiopharmaceuticals and former CEO of ARTMS Inc., is leading Nucleus as CEO. I’m also honored to sit on the Board of Directors with an incredible group of industry experts: Manu Nair, Chair of Corporate Development at Mayo Clinic; 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. The diverse and tremendously successful background of the board represents the collective expertise required to execute on Nucleus’ mission.
In order to better serve the needs of cancer patients, we must increase the supply of radiopharmaceuticals to give hospitals the ability to expand patient access. By fast tracking the next generation of therapies, Nucleus is bridging the gap between innovation and clinic, enabling these new drugs to be deployed to a much wider portion of the population. The Eclipse team is honored to partner with the Mayo Clinic and the Nucleus teams to provide new hope for cancer patients around the world.
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