NanoRED directs cancer drugs to tumors

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NanoRED LLC

Location: Medical College of Wisconsin
Founder: Johnathan Ebben, Gang Xin, Karthika Divakaran, Pradeep Kannampalli and Ranjit Verma.
Founded: 2015
Product: Cancer therapeutics delivery platform
Website: nanoredbiotech.com
Employees: Three
Goal: Get the product to patients

Experience: Graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in chemistry, immunology, oncology,
pharmacology and toxicology at MCW, Blood Center of Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

When doctors are treating cancer, it can be difficult to get medication to cancer cells while sparing healthy cells. A Wauwatosa startup is working to address this problem by using IR-triggered liposomes to deliver cancer therapeutics directly to tumors.

Gang Xin and Johnathan Ebben in the lab. (Lila Aryan Photography)

Led by Johnathan Ebben, an M.D./Ph.D. student in pharmacology and toxicology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and Gang Xin, a post-doctoral fellow in immunology at the Blood Center of Wisconsinโ€™s Blood Research Institute, the company was formed after a group of students and post-doctoral fellows joined forces to participate in the National Cancer Institute and the Center for Advancing Innovationโ€™s Nanotechnology Startup Challenge in Cancer.

Using an NCI platform, NanoRED has developed a unique application and is bringing it through pre-clinical experiments. The goal is to advance it to clinical trials in about three years, Ebben said, but first they must demonstrate how the toxicity is metabolized in the body.

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โ€œAll of the targeted molecular therapies that exist right now arenโ€™t effective,โ€ Ebben said. โ€œThis technology leapfrogs all of that because we can directly release many different drugs right where we want it in the tumor microenvironment.โ€

NanoRED won the Life Sciences category in the 2017 Governorโ€™s Business Plan Contest, and has also participated in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukeeโ€™s I-Corps program, both of which provided the grant funding, business services and mentorship that have so far supported the company. Xin and Ebben plan to apply for a federal SBIR/STTR grant within the next year.

NanoRED coordinates with investigators, primarily research scientist Amit Joshi, at MCW to design the experiments to test its platform.

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The fastest way to get to clinical trials is probably by licensing each molecular entity to a few different pharmaceutical groups, Ebben said.

โ€œOnce we can show that we can deliver a molecule to a tumor without affecting the rest of the body, itโ€™s a way for us to potentially collaborate with a lot of different people to advance many different therapies,โ€ he said.

โ€œWe both have family members suffering from cancer, terminal stage,โ€ Xin said. โ€œWe really want this thing to go to market as soon as possible.โ€ 

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