“Our mission is to bring patients who have already exhausted many treatment options another chance to live a cancer-free life,\u201d says Xiuling Lu, acting CEO of Nami and associate professor of pharmaceutics in UConn\u2019s School of Pharmacy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Incorporated in 2018, Nami Therapeutics is based on nanotechnologies developed by Lu and her collaborators at UConn, as well as a pioneering technology that Lu and co-founder Michael Jay invented nine years ago at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.<\/p>\n The startup is now located at UConn\u2019s Technology Incubation Program (TIP)<\/a> where they are conducting R&D on their current product, a tumor-specific radioactive therapy designed to specifically target peritoneal metastasis of ovarian cancer. Animal studies have shown that the platform offers increased efficacy and reduced toxicity as compared to other treatment options.<\/p>\n Globally, 239,000 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year. Five-year survival rates for advanced ovarian cancer are only 28%, leaving patients with inadequate and ineffective treatment options.<\/p>\n One of the biggest problems with current ovarian cancer therapies is that they can\u2019t effectively target the tumor without also spreading throughout the rest of the body. Nami\u2019s product \u2013 nanoparticles carrying the radioisotope Ho-166 \u2013 selectively targets cancer metastasis in the peritoneal cavity, while remaining only in the peritoneal space.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s where we want the radioactivity to stay,\u201d Lu says. \u201cWe don\u2019t want it spreading throughout the body. It stays put in the region with the cancer cells.\u201d<\/p>\n Another major advantage of Nami\u2019s technology over existing treatments is the manufacturing process used to create the radioactive nanoparticles. Nami\u2019s production process reduces the amount of time that technicians might need to handle the radioactive product.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople know that making radioactive isotopes is hard. Nobody wants to handle that,\u201d Lu says. \u201cOurs is a safe, effective, and far more economical process because our manufacturing uses non-radioactive materials and then simply requires a one-step conversion to make it radioactive.\u201d<\/p>\n The company has received entrepreneurial training and seed funding from UConn\u2019s NSF I-Corps Site, Accelerate UConn, and the Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. \u00a0Lu credits these opportunities with helping her team better understand the business concepts they needed to get their company off the ground.<\/p>\n \u201cThese programs helped us shape our business plan, so we started to think like entrepreneurs and business people as well as scientists,\u201d Lu says. \u201cA lot of technologies are so fancy and look so nice, but you can\u2019t move that technology as a product without understanding the business side of things.\u201d<\/p>\n Through the startup, Lu and her collaborators recently won a grant from the NIH National Cancer Institute\u2019s highly competitive Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program. In this funding round, only 13% of applicants received funding to commercialize promising technologies.<\/p>\n Nami Therapeutics is also working on a particle to deliver drugs to reduce the recurrence of leukemia by effectively targeting cancer stem cells with chemotherapy drugs. They are currently looking to continue their pre-clinical trial research with plans for full clinical trials in a few years.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re still an early startup, but we have a big mission,\u201d says Lu.<\/p>\n Follow UConn Research on <\/em>Twitter<\/em><\/a> & <\/em>LinkedIn<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nami Therapeutics, a collaboration by UConn and the University of North Carolina, is developing a tumor-specific radioactive therapy designed to specifically target ovarian cancer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":155991,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2076,1864,2225],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[175],"class_list":["post-155990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","category-pharm","category-uconn-storrs"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-26 09:52:46","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155990"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":156041,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155990\/revisions\/156041"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/155991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155990"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=155990"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=155990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/IMG_2625-e1572378262995-1024x669.jpg\")