Nigerian-born Chidiebere Uzodinma Awah, MD, PhD, CEO of UTR Therapeutics Inc., has created a technology with the potential to treat not only a range of aggressive cancers, but also Alzheimer’s disease, metabolic diseases, and more. A winner of a 2023 XSeed Award, Awah talked with Cure about his journey from medical doctor to researcher to entrepreneur, and a second important discovery he made: That even a very smart scientist like himself needs a lot of support when entering the business world.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Cure: You are at a pivotal point in your journey to bring your science into the marketplace. But let’s step back to hear where it all began. You first trained as a medical doctor. Was that always your dream?
Awah: As a child I was very good in biology, chemistry, and physics. When we were about 13 years old, one of my friends — who is now a part of our company — told me he thought I’d be very good at medicine. A few years later, one of my classmates in secondary school said the same. So that’s how I went on to train as a medical doctor in Nigeria, where I cared for patients with very aggressive tumors that were not responsive to chemotherapy.
Cure: Have you lost anyone close to you to cancer?
Awah: I've not lost anybody myself, but one of my best friends, his mother succumbed to uterine cancer sarcoma, and other friends’ mothers have had ovarian cancer. Both of these cancers are aggressive and hard to treat.
When I came to the United States, I started working on glioblastoma, another very aggressive cancer. I thought to myself, “There has to be something that can be done.” So, I went back to school and did my PhD in the genetics of non-coding gene regulation at the Hannover Medical School, in Germany. Then I did a postdoc in genome engineering, CRISPR and molecular biology. I was able to put those things together, and I discovered that RNA methylation and ribosome machinery could control cancer.
Cure: Fascinating. Once you made this discovery, what were your next steps to making it into a startup?
Awah: From my work on RNA methylation on the 3’UTR of mRNAs, I conceived the idea that since most cancers’ oncogenes mRNA are stabilized on their 3’UTR, if you can engineer the oncogenes to become unstable, the body can get rid of them through a normal process called nonsense mediated decay.
I shared the idea with Kevin Struhl, a professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and a member of U.S. National Academies of Sciences and Medicine, who has been a longtime mentor of mine. He guided me on tightening this novel idea in a research proposal.
Then I met Seun Ogunwobi, a professor of cancer biology, who was then at City University of New York, (and now chairs the Michigan State University Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology), and we started doing the work to prove that the technology works. By the end of 2021, we had a solid proof of concept. And from there at UTR Therapeutics, we developed a novel mRNA platform technology that has yielded many small size mRNA drugs for different diseases.
Cure: How did you meet the partners in your company?
Awah: Seun heard about a program called Nucleate, a business accelerator that helps young scientists by vetting people who are interested in their technology to see whether you fit with them. It was through Nucelate that I met Matt Mezer, a U.S. veteran who fought in the Afghanistan War and has now transitioned into biotech, as well as another very smart scientist, Reeti Sanghrajka. Although I was the one who made the discovery, I could see that these people were as excellent as they come. I said, okay, these are the folks I’m going to form a company with.
Cure: How did you learn about the XSeed Award?
Awah: I saw it on LinkedIn. I carefully, meticulously assembled the application, and we were selected for the interview. The reviewers are very distinguished people, very senior scientists — one is the head of the Albert Lasker Foundation, one of them is from Eli Lilly, another from Harvard, who is now the head of pharmacology for Deerfield.
The reviewers were very impressed with the technology and the results. Because it’s one thing to have fancy technology, it’s another thing to show that it works. And not only that, but we also have a very good delivery system, the iron oxide nanocages developed by Hiroshi Matsui, a professor of Nanotechnology at CUNY. This delivery is as important as my discovery, and I think that was what convinced them to support us with the XSeed Award.
Cure: Congratulations again on being selected! Has your technology been tested on humans?
Awah: Not yet. We've tested it on animals, know it’s effective, and know it works. We have submitted the Investigational New Drug (IND) application to the FDA. By late 2025, we should have an IND approval to test, and hopefully, we can start recruiting patients into a clinical trial. 2026 will be dedicated to the phase one trial, and then by the second quarter or third quarter of 2027, we should be filing for an accelerated new drug application (NDA), which would allow us to give it to patients who really need it.
Cure: The XSeed Award provided a $250,000 grant. How has that been able to transform the speed at which you’ve been able to work?
Awah: The XSeed Award has been a big blessing to us. When I went for the interview, we presented proof of concept and evidence that it works in vivo for three cancers. Once we received the funding from the award, we’ve were able to expand testing to more than 17 human cancers, including triple negative breast cancer, ovarian cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, prostate cancers, lymphomas and leukemias, pancreatic cancers, colorectal cancers, pediatric cancers, you name it.
It turns out that the drug has potential applications for Alzheimer's and metabolic diseases as well, so we already are repurposing the drug for obesity. With the XSeed Award, we've been able to do so many things.
Cure: What has surprised you about this whole journey?
Awah: For scientists, you get shocked when you are brought into the business world. The business world is an entirely different world from academia. You must have a very strong legal framework to protect your intellectual properties, because at the end of the day, this is what makes your company viable. If your idea is not protected, everything you've worked for could be gone. Most scientists do not know this. I didn’t. But the Cure ecosystem is made up of very accomplished businesspeople who give us advice. They vet the investors who are interested in our company. The Cure network is giving us guidance in areas we know nothing about.
Cure: The XSeed Award is given to minority-led and women-led businesses. What would you say to other scientists like you who have great ideas and might be thinking about applying for next year’s award?
Awah: This award gives you the freedom to be able to answer difficult questions. The FDA is going to ask you about safety, the optimal dose, where it gets delivered, how it gets delivered, what is the mechanism of action. You must answer all these questions for your molecule to even be viable in the eyes of the regulator. You need seed capital to do that, which the XSeed Award provides.
You must also have very strong mentorship, which you also get once you are a part of the Cure network. The XSeed Award is given to those based in New York, but I hope it will go national and global. So many young scientists—not just minorities—across the country and around the world have interesting ideas that could become the new engine of our economy. So, I pray that more people win the XSeed Award. It opens doors. It completely changed the dynamic for us.
Now in its fourth year, the XSeed Award program provides up to $250,000 grants to New York City minority- and women-led life science and healthcare startups working on novel preclinical drug development projects. Winning teams also join the ecosystem of Cure.®, a healthcare innovation campus in New York City. The teams receive peer-learning and office hours with investors, entrepreneurs, and business experts. Learn more.