An Audio Interview with Dr. Noah Smick, President, Neutron Therapeutics
I very-much enjoyed catching up with Dr. Noah Smick in Danvers, MA, USA on April 15, 2025. Noah has been involved in several high-technology ventures in his career, and for many years now has been involved with developing clinical Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) for cancer treatment through Neutron Therapeutics. In fact, good news in this area includes a clinical trial in Europe.
https://www.neutrontherapeutics.com/news/pr_051525/
The link to my audio interview with Noah is below. Following the link are time stamps for each question asked, and then the first few words of Noah’s answers.
Question 1 (00:00): Who do you work for, and what is your role?
I am President of Neutron Therapeutics. We are a company that makes medical devices …
Question 2 (00:24): Are you able to speak to which medical therapy territory you are in?
As the name implies, Neutron Therapeutics uses neutron radiation as the driver for our external beam radiation therapy. But what we are actually doing is enabling a new type of radiation therapy, which is referred to as Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) …
Question 3 (01:36): Would you mind describing the preferential binding aspect of the therapy?
Chemotherapy is a good analogy, but the best analogy is Nuclear Medicine …
Question 4 (02:01): To be clear, that is a different industry, but analogous ….
It is analogous in that we use the same targeting mechanisms …
Question 5 (03:20): So, neutrons are neutral, and pass through the body …
They interact very weakly with most matter, but there are specific isotopes that, for complicated reasons, have very strong affinities for neutrons, such as Boron-10 …
Question 6 (04:15): The neutrons run into the Boron and then what happens?
Yes, so what happens, a very specific nuclear reaction occurs …
Question 7 (05:35): The alpha particle emitted only travels the distance of a cancer cell?
The range of the alpha particle is about 10 microns, similar to the diameter of a cell …
Question 8 (08:46): What’s exciting about this?
…….. it’s very possible to treat metastatic disease ………
Question 9 (10:50): You’re kind of in the early days?
We have two of our systems installed in medical facilities (Japan, Helsinki) …. I hesitate to prognosticate, but we are very close to clinical use …
Question 10 (11:41): What’s your educational background?
Not a very direct route …. I studied fusion ….
Question 11 (13:35): What schools did you go to?
Undergrad Cornell ….. and then fusion work at MIT ….. PhD research …
Question 12 (15:16): Is there anything from your childhood, maybe an anecdote of who you were then, and you’re still using that now …
I feel like I always knew I wanted to be an engineer. I wanted to build, to create …
Question 13 (16:04): Was that from when you were like 7?
Even younger I would say …
Question 14 (16:57): Are there some cases of what you liked to build when you were young?
… one significant one I remember was a trebuchet …
Question 15 (17:51): What size was it? Was it inches tall?
Its throwing arm was 10 or 12 feet long … it could throw things one hundred feet …
It was a great pleasure to interview Noah. It has been exciting to learn since the interview that the Neutron Therapeutics system in Helsinki is now being utilized for clinical trials. I know it has been a tremendous amount of work to get to this stage of approvals in Europe, and I wish Noah, and Neutron Therapeutics continued best wishes in treating cancer with BNCT!
