This Medical Student’s Own Health Scare Inspired Her To Create Safer Cancer Treatment
Nistha Neupane lived with throat pain for nearly a decade before any doctors looked closely enough to find its cause. As an uninsured Nepalese immigrant, she was dismissed at hospital visits for years.
"I think sometimes you forget that there's a patient behind whatever condition exists," Neupane says. That experience now drives her work as a medical student and co-founder of NanoLit, a startup developing a less invasive, more targeted form of chemotherapy.
A childhood shaped by healthcare gaps
Neupane's family moved to the United States from Nepal when she was around four years old so her father could pursue his education, and eventually get her and her brother theirs. Her father was on a student visa, and the family moved often while he completed his studies. "For most of my life I was uninsured. I've lived across two different countries, six different states," Neupane says.
This made it hard to get good medical care when her throat pain started around age 11 or 12. She played saxophone, sang in musical theater, and interviewed sources as a high school journalist, so her voice was always in use. She described it as a constant lingering pain but, without insurance, getting answers wasn't simple. Getting biopsies in U.S. is very expensive, and physicians often dismissed her pain or didn't take the next step to investigate it.
While many women face the issue of dismissive doctors, Neupane believes she was also given lesser medical care for most of her life because of her family's situation. "Sometimes there is that gap in healthcare between those who are insured and who are not insured," she explains, adding that being immigrants compounded the problem.
The discovery that changed everything
The breakthrough came during a wisdom-teeth consultation when she was around 20, in the middle of college. Her surgeon noticed the pain she pointed to and inspected the area himself, finding a mass he considered concerning. Upon further inspection, the surgeon found a tumor sitting at the back of her throat near her soft palate. It had grown over several years to a size that would have eventually obstructed her breathing. It was cancerous but benign, meaning it wasn't metastasizing throughout her body.
However, surgery posed the risk of introducing the cancerous cells to the airway and lymph nodes. A small incision made too deep also risked creating a hole between the nasal cavity and the speech area, so Neupane's oral surgeon referred her to a specialist in Lousiana rather than operating himself.
By the time of her diagnosis, Neupane's family had moved to Texas, where her father was teaching at Texas A&M Texarkana and Neupane had insurance. Still, the family was navigating financial strain. She was grateful that her oral surgeon was able to combine her wisdom-teeth removal and biopsy into a single surgery under one round of anesthesia to spare her family a second hospital bill.
"He really took that extra step to see what my needs were, seeing what it would do to my family to have that double hospital bill," Neupane says.
Finding her path into oncology
Even before finding out about her tumor, Neupane intended to go to medical school. She started college as a biology major before adding chemistry. In the lab of her research mentor, Noureen Siraj, Ph.D., at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, she was introduced to cancer research.
"She really kind of gave me that first push of learning about cancer," Neupane says. Siraj makes a point of involving undergraduates early, which gave Neupane hands-on experience most students don't get until later in their training.
Outside the lab, she shadowed Sunil Patel, M.D., a family friend and oncologist practicing in Texarkana, during school breaks, watching his patients go through chemotherapy. As she moved between the chemistry lab and the oncology clinic, then learned she had a tumor herself, she felt pulled toward long-term work in cancer care. "It was really when I bridged that gap that I realized that this might be something that I want to do long term," she says.
From the lab bench to Silicon Valley
As a member of the Donaghey Scholars Honors Program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, a full-ride scholarship program covering tuition, housing, and study abroad, Neupane met her classmate Zane Austin. The two were pre-med classmates for all four years and worked on separate cancer-drug projects in Siraj's lab.
As graduation neared this past spring, Siraj forward Neupane and Austin an email about the America's Startup 250 competition, which was designed to spotlight ideas at their earliest stages. The competitions focuses on pitches from undergraduates and trade school students, a group Neupane says often gets overlooked since these types of competitions aimed at graduate and medical students.
"We honestly kind of applied on a whim," Neupane says. They hadn't spent years developing a business plan—chemistry faculty helped the classmates film a two-minute pitch based on what they had been working on in Siraj's oncology lab for the past four years—and they largely forgot about the submission until they learned they'd made it to the semifinals about three weeks before graduation.
When Neupane and Austin arrived at Draper University in Silicon Valley, they weren't prepared for the scale of the event or the competitiveness of schools from the East and West Coasts. She recalls beind pulled into hair and makeup the second they got there, and showing other attendees where Arkansas was on a map.
But the weekend opened doors to pitch directly to investors and to connect with biotech students from other universities, relationships she's maintained since. "For them to actually think that what we're doing is something worthy of their time and investment was honestly a really unique experience," she says.
This year's fall round will bring 30 semifinalists to Washington, D.C., to pitch business leaders and investors, with the top 10 receiving the same grant. The winners of the fall round will join Neupane, Austin, and the other top 10 winners for a chance to compete for part of a $1 million prize pool.
The innovation behind NanoLit
Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the U.S., Neupane describes the main problem with current treatments to be how invasive they are. Many standard chemotherapy drugs go beyond killing tumor cells, to kill healthy hair, skin and nail cells, which causes to patients lose their hair and feel constantly dehydrated. "Our main goal was to make cancer safer for patients," Neupane says.
NanoLit's compound, developed in a lab that partners with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, combines an existing chemotherapy component with another agent to make treatment more selective to tumor cells while sparing healthy tissue. In other words, if successful, Nanolit would be a safer, more targeted version of chemotherapy.
The compound has been tested on lab-grown breast cancer cells and in mice, and graduate students in the lab have already published research on versions of it. So far, it has shown very little toxicity to the heart, which matters because heart damage is a major side effect of some common chemotherapy drugs, which can drives follow-up cardiology visits and medical bills. Neupane and the rest of the lab team are now working to finalize approval before moving toward clinical trials.
The takeaway
Neupane has had a whirlwind of a few months. Not only did she make it to the top 10 in the America's Startup competition, but she graduated from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with honors in the spring and has since started at the University of Texas at Tyler School of Medicine. She isn't certain yet whether she'll pursue oncology, though it's the specialty she's leaning toward most. Over the next five to 10 years, she hopes medical school and NanoLit will grow together.
Her own diagnosis and her time in the clinic inform her work with NanoLit, especially when it comes to the innately human perspective. "It's easy to be in a chemistry lab behind a fume hood where you're by yourself late at night running experiments," she says. But even before her compound could reach anyone, watching patients go through chemo made the stakes clear. "I was able to see how much we need more treatments because of how much these patients were struggling."
NanoLit's compound still has to clear clinical trials before it reaches patients, but Neupane's path shows how living through gaps in care can shape what a scientist sets out to fix. It also shows that the right opportunity doesn't always wait for a finished plan. If you're an undergraduate or trade school student with an early idea, the fall round will be accepting two-minute video pitches accompanied by a short written proposal through October 8.