Nusano Chief Executive Officer Chris Lowe is a serial C-Suite executive and biotech lifer, but he started off as a small fish in a small pond—and says he’s better off for it.
“I think it was a little bit serendipitous that my first early stage company turned out to be a biotech company,” he recently recalled. “And as I recall, I think I was about the 20th employee. And I quickly learned, literally within a couple of weeks, the passion at these small companies for the patient, and that these folks literally live and die with the ups and downs of clinical trial development. And I knew within a few weeks, even at a young age, that I could never do anything else. Because being that close to folks that were touching the patient was really magical to me.”
Several professional stops later, Lowe now makes sure Nusano follows through on its mission to make rare and undersupplied medical radioisotopes available and abundant. It’s cutting-edge medical care that, obviously, touches many lives, but for Lowe, it’s a virtuous circle that has touched his own life in a tangible, serendipitous way. When his late mother was ailing and brought to the hospital, she was put on an experimental drug that was the first Lowe had ever worked on in biotech. The experience was profound, and its memory has driven his career ever since.
“And there's a lot of moments in terms of tough financings or tough decisions and whatnot that you can easily point to,” he said, “but that was one of those full circle moments where even still talking about it today still gives me a little bit of chills to realize that I played a small part in enabling the team to get that drug on the market and it ends up touching real people.”
It’s fitting that a family member figures prominently in Lowe’s professional journey, given his stance toward building companies. “A core component of companies of this stage,” he said, “is that family aspect that we're in this together, we're in this for a mission,” he said.
As Nusano continues to expand, Lowe is keeping his eye on the mission, knowing that his company’s work is—as it once did for his own family, and may do again—touching the lives of everyday people. “In this field, there's an adage of what's good for the patient is good for business,” he said. “And in a world where we get distracted by congressional pricing of drugs, FDA regulations, who's running what, our world is about truly just improving the life of a patient that we may or may not meet.”
