This year may not have been the smooth return to normal many expected, but Memphis’ penchant for clever thinking and creative problem solving continues unabated. In 2021, for our ninth Innovation Awards running, Inside Memphis Business features prominent individuals and bright thinkers who are showcasing Memphis’ evolution through innovation. And like every year, there are always plenty of candidates to choose from, spanning industries ranging from the medical field to logistics.
This year, we recognize Chloe Hakim-Moore’s reforms to childcare and early education, Mason George’s new technology to ease congested supply chain issues, Dr. Leta Nutt’s chemical sterilant meant to cut down on the overwhelming number of stray animals, and Dr. Michael Whitt’s crucial contribution to the production of effective Covid-19 vaccines. They're all worthy winners in their own right, and are doing their utmost to move Memphis forward. Today, we introduce you to Leta Nutt; other winners will be profiled throughout December.
photograph by latonya bounds
Dr. Leta Nutt — Founder, Nutt Bio
It's a heart wrenching sight to spy stray dogs and cats wandering forlornly through the streets of Memphis. And with many shelters hovering around full capacity, it’s impossible to properly care for all the lost animals that need help.
But Dr. Leta Nutt, a former researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, wasn’t going to stand for that. Using all her experience from a long bioscience career that included studying cell death and fertility, she developed a chemical sterilant injection that can be used on animals, offering a cheap, noninvasive alternative to surgery for neutering — and potentially cutting down on the large number of strays in the United States.
“The overpopulation really is an epidemic. People don’t realize the United States spends over a billion dollars a year to catch, contain, or have to kill dogs and cats.” — Leta Nutt
According to PETA, there are an estimated 70 million homeless dogs and cats in the United States per year. “Driving through Memphis to my home on Mud Island, I would always see stray dogs,” recalls Nutt, currently a dog mom to three sweet pomeranians named Bear, Carbon, and Ash. “So I thought to myself, ‘What could I do?’ Overpopulation is the issue here, so we had to find a way to sterilize these animals and cut down on the number of homeless animals we see.” She enrolled in the Patents to Products program at the University of Memphis to start her business Nutt Bio, and began testing her drug – initially called TriSteris – on rats.
She found that after a month, the drug, injected once into each testes, caused full sterilization through sperm cell and leydig cell apoptosis (controlled cell death as part of development). But to start, Nutt plans to roll out a drug to farmers first, to be used on piglets.
“We slaughter 120 million adult pigs per year, and half of those are male,” she says. But as piglets, the males are castrated between three to five days of being born to avoid ‘boar taint,’ a bad taste and odor that’s present in pork from uncastrated male pigs. The sterilization would allow farmers a far more humane way to avoid this, as well as allowing for the pigs to grow larger before preparing them for market.
“And if you think about it, piglets are similar in size to cats,” Nutt continues, “so we’d scale up our distribution using pigs and tackle cats next. Finally, we’d approach the dog community. They’re a bit more complex, since it’s a species that has so much breadth in sizes, from a chihuahua to a great Dane.”
After further tests to be done in early 2022, Nutt expects to have FDA approval for the drug for piglets within the year. And as she scales up her operation, her hope is to cut down on the number of strays and lower taxpayer costs at the same time. “The overpopulation really is an epidemic,” she says. “People don’t realize the United States spends over a billion dollars a year to catch, contain, or have to kill dogs and cats.”
But piglets, dogs, and cats are just the beginning for Nutt. If she can help with those animal populations, why not aim for others as well? “If you look at Colombia, there’s been the recent issue that descendents of the hippos that Pablo Escobar brought there are overpopulating and becoming dangerous to the ecosystem north of Bógota, and they’re talking about either sterilization or euthanasia as solutions. Something like this could help there: a quick, noninvasive solution without having to kill them. It’s something I hope can help a lot of animals.”
