‘Reverse Outsourcing’ Local company lures Indian partner
Kattesh Katti and Raghuraman Kannan, co-founders of Nanoparticle Biochem Inc., introduced Churchill to executives of Shasun Pharmaceuticals Ltd. and gave him a fast-paced tour of their native region that lasted 12 days.
But Churchill and the two MU research scientists said the effort paid off.
Shasun, a company with 1,400 employees on India’s southeastern coast, agreed to invest $2 million to $3 million during the next 18 months in a joint venture with Nanoparticle Biochem.
The new company, Shasun NBI, will develop a prostate cancer treatment created in MU labs and licensed by the university. The treatment uses microscopic, irradiated gold particles injected into a tumor site to kill cancer cells.
The method, now being tested on animals, is more precise than traditional chemotherapy and radiation therapy, which destroy both cancer cells and healthy cells.
With the Shasun investment, the company will hire more scientists, and the therapy will advance toward human testing. If the drug treatment is approved for humans and reaches the market, the new company and MU would share the royalties. MU officials pointed out that the university’s hospitals and clinics would be among the first to benefit from the cancer treatment.
Nanaparticle Biochem, which has 15 employees, was competing with UCLA to form a partnership with Shasun in the area of nanomedicine. The trip NBI representatives and Churchill took to meet Shasun’s executives last spring was the second delegation from MU; the first was headed by Chancellor Brady Deaton two years ago.
“Without the trip to India, this would not be possible,” Katti said during a news conference at the MU Life Sciences Business Incubator. The principals signed the agreement in August and celebrated the deal Dec. 2 at the incubator, which will house part of Shasun NBI’s operations.
Rob Duncan, vice chancellor for research at MU, said the partnership is an example of “exactly what we need to do” to create high-tech jobs within the United States rather than having jobs outsourced to India and elsewhere overseas.
“This is reverse outsourcing,” Duncan said.
Abhaya Kumar, a founding director of Shasun who traveled from India to attend the ceremony, expressed confidence that the cancer treatment will have widespread applications and said the platform will be developed in Columbia.
“Everything we need for developing this product for use in patients is at the University of Missouri,” Kumar said.
Katti’s research career started 25 years ago at the India Institute of Science in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, where he earned his doctorate. He came to MU in 1990 in part because it’s home to the largest university-owned nuclear research reactor, one of just a few sites that could produce radioactive nanoparticles.
Katti is the principal inventor on more than 70 patents and inventions in the chemical, biological, optical and nanotechnological aspects of cancer research.
Six years ago, Katti and his team of chemists, physicists and radiologists formed Nanoparticle Biochem to develop products for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer based on their discoveries at MU. Katti is senior vice president; Kannan, who also earned his doctorate at the India Institute of Science, is vice president; Henry W. White is the president and CEO; Kavita Katti, Katti’s wife, is the chief science officer; and Anandhi Upendran is the director of research.
After MU business development specialists helped them form the company, Upendran learned how to write a business plan, received guidance about applying for funding from private sources and government agencies and took a class to learn about developing presentations for private angel investors.
NBI received two Small Business Innovation Research awards from the National Institutes of Health, for $100,000 and $150,000. The company used seed money — a $5,000 grant from the Missouri Technology Incentive Program — to develop additional applications for research funds.
In 2005, Katti received a research grant from the National Cancer Institute that distinguished MU as the nanotechnology platform in an NCI-supported consortium of 12 universities.
Their tests involving mice with prostate tumors demonstrated that a single dose of the radioactive gold nanoparticle injected into the bloodstream caused an 82 percent reduction in tumor volume.
The nanoparticles are small enough to escape the blood stream and accumulate in tumors. The results of the study published in April in the journal Nanomedicine showed minimal or no leakage of radioactivity into other organs, a sign that the nanoparticles are only toxic to tumors.
Mike Nichols, vice president of research and economic development for the University of Missouri System, said he believes the drug has the potential for substantial sales.
“Shasun is a perfect partner to hopefully bring MU’s promising new cancer therapy to a world market,” Nichols said. “Universities like MU need strong commercial collaborators, especially in medicine, because it typically takes hundreds of millions of dollars and more than a decade to take a potential treatment for patients from the laboratory to the clinic”
Kattesh Katti’s team formed a second company, GreenNano, that explores ways to use natural rather than artificial material. For example, Katti determined that cinnamon could be a non-toxic alternative to the chemicals and acids used to create gold nanoparticles.
Nanoparticle Biochem Inc. is one of many companies that received assistance from MU Extension’s Business Development Program. MU Extension recently announced that for the first time since the program’s inception, it achieved more than $1 billion in estimated economic impact for the state of Missouri in one year.
The Missouri Small Business & Technology Development Centers and Missouri Procurement Technical Assistance Centers released their results for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.
The agencies reported that in Missouri and the central region that includes Columbia, they assisted clients in attaining:
• Increase in sales: $515 million statewide,
$11 million regionally
• Investments: $204 million, $5.2 million
• Government contracts: $468 million, $32 million
• Research grants funded: $8 million, $4.6 million
• Creating or retaining 16,143 jobs statewide, 1,011 jobs regionally
• Starting 265 businesses statewide, 22 regionally
“Small businesses are the job creators in our state and nation, creating investments, sales and quality of life in our communities,” Mary Paulsell, director of communications for the Business Development Program, said in a news release. “These results validate what economic development research has said for some time — that small, innovative entrepreneurial companies hold the key to economic recovery.”