By Sharon Ballard
Little Rock, AR – NuShores Biosciences LLC has won a 3-year, $2.8M contract from the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium (MTEC), a 501(c)(3) biomedical technology consortium associated with the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command. The contract will enable NuShores to develop intelligent automated production of its NuCress™ bone void filler scaffold products using its “factory in a box” concept. Key collaborators on the project include MiQ Partners (Cincinnati, Ohio) and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
The work will be led by NuShores’ CEO Sharon Ballard and supported by NuShores’ manufacturing manager Mr. Mark Pelo, a 27-year veteran of the implantable medical devices industry who joined the company in July 2020. According to Pelo, “This project will enable NuShores to compete globally in pricing and performance and to accelerate the maturity of emerging products in our pipeline.”
The MTEC contract builds on an already noteworthy year for NuShores. Recently, the company established one of the only medical device clean manufacturing facilities in Arkansas. “This new contract will enable us to develop an intelligent, hands-free factory in a box with features such as real-time situational awareness that anticipates failures or production challenges before they cause waste. Our factory in a box concept will reduce human error to increase quality and meet regulatory standards”, said Ballard.
The MiQ team will be led by Harry Westerkamp (CTO), with Martin Bouliane (VP Client Partner) providing both automation and process expertise. Westerkamp has over 30 years of experience in engineering, IoT, and manufacturing, while Bouliane has a unique background of engineering, product design, and automation. MiQ Partners brings a long history of manufacturing intelligence solving complex problems. MiQ will combine their automation experience with NuShores’ material sciences experience in bone regeneration scaffolds to develop multi-generational manufacturing solutions and a roadmap of the full expression of the factory in a box concept for future investment. “It is opportunities like the NuCress™ scaffold products that make it fun to come to work since we can really help create value for patients and their physicians,” commented MiQ Partners’ CEO Olaf Tessarzyk.
Founded in 2014, NuShores is the licensee of UA Little Rock’s bone regeneration products, which have been developed primarily with DoD funding. Today, NuShores is positioning itself to become a leader in regenerative medicine by tackling some of the field’s most challenging clinical problems. For Dr. Alex Biris, Director of the UA Little Rock Center for Integrative Nanotechnology Sciences, co-founder of NuShores, and pioneer of the NuCress™ scaffold technology, the new contract follows over a decade of intense research into the science of tissue regeneration. “We are very pleased that MTEC saw the value and innovation in our manufacturing process. This contract represents a major step toward getting our bone regeneration scaffold in the hands of surgeons and fulfilling our promises to the DOD. Smart manufacturing will help make our long term advanced research a clinical reality,” said Biris.
Karrer Alghazali, a UA Little Rock doctoral graduate and research scientist at NuShores, added, “This project will allow us to move from a labor intensive manual process to a standardized system engineering automated process that will benefit our current and future product pipeline. It is exciting to have been a part of both this groundbreaking tissue regeneration research and now innovating the manufacturing automation efforts of the resulting medical devices.” Dr. Alghazali has more than 15 publications in scientific journals; he is also a co-inventor on several issued patents and patent applications related to NuShores’ licensed technologies.
“UA Little Rock is pleased to continue its productive collaboration with NuShores. Research is a cornerstone of our university, and we look forward to seeing these tangible results,” said Dr. Brian Berry, UA Little Rock Vice Provost for Research.
About NuShores Biosciences LLC
NuShores’ vision is to improve the quality of life for people globally and to compete successfully in the bone and tissue regenerative materials industry. Early studies suggest that NuShores’ licensed, patented technology could deliver improved solutions for bone regeneration while cutting healthcare costs, lowering treatment risks and reducing healing times. Research results show that NuShores’ NuCress™ scaffold could offer a number of benefits that to date are not achieved by currently marketed bone regeneration products, therefore promising to bring better treatment outcomes to millions of people with severe bone injuries. NuShores has the exclusive, global license from University of Arkansas Little Rock to commercialize university-owned patented and patent-pending bone regeneration technologies.
About MiQ Partners
For more MiQ Partners information, visit https://miqpartners.com
