NuShores CEO Sharon Ballard holds a piece of the bone regeneration technology her company will manufacture and sell.
NuShores Biosciences LLC is moving from the BioVentures building on the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences campus in Little Rock to a west Little Rock office complex, where it will open one of only a few medical device clean manufacturing facilities in the state, the company said.
NuShores, founded in 2014, is licensing NuCress bone regeneration technology from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The NuCress scaffold is an implantable device that promotes controlled bone regeneration in fractures and gaps in bone or major injury defects, including previously untreatable catastrophic injuries. NuShores will make and sell NuCress products.
NuShores making the products is a recent development. Last month, UA Little Rock received state and federal approval to award a services contract to NuShores for generation one manufacturing of the products. The contract is funded by a $5.6 million Department of Defense grant awarded to the university in 2019.
Alex Biris, director of the UA Little Rock Center for Integrative Nanotechnology Sciences, is the lead researcher and co-founder of NuShores. CEO Sharon Ballard is overseeing the contracted work.
She expects NuCress products to be approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration in 18 months or less. They will be made and stored until the approval comes through.
Once that happens, the company will sell the products to doctors, hospitals and health care systems, Ballard said. She said many have already expressed interest.
Ballard said it’s unusual for one company to make and sell a medical device.
She also said NuShores has been adding to its nine-person staff. It employs student interns as well, and it aims to hire three more people this month. Among its new hires is Manufacturing Manager Mark Pelo, a 27-year medical device industry veteran who signed on in July.
On manufacturing the NuCress products, Ballard said, “I think that we can do it and do it right here in Little Rock, Arkansas, not anywhere else.”
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