Researchers at a Roanoke-based biotech company might have discovered a way to extend their therapeutic delivery system’s shelf life. It could lead to big advances in mitigating radiation treatment for cancer patients and the muscle damage done by heart attacks.
By Tad Dickens
September 18, 2025
At The Tiny Cargo Co., it’s not all about the cargo. The vessel plays a big role, too. Vehicle and rider together might put the company on the road to medical breakthroughs.
Tiny Cargo’s combo — a therapeutic medicine transported via cell components from a cow — could prove to be the first major commercial breakthrough to emerge from Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion. Tiny Cargo co-founders Rob Gourdie and Spencer Marsh spun it off from the institute in 2020.
Eddie Amos, a former executive at Microsoft, Meridium and GE Digital, is board chair for GO Virginia Region 2 and has been following the company closely. Amos said he is a “big fan” of Gourdie and Marsh. GO Virginia is a commonwealth-wide economic development initiative.
“If I wasn’t involved with GO Virginia … I would be an investor,” he said. “When they came up with the idea to build Tiny Cargo, it was the perfect mix of academic rigor and … to move something from the lab environment into a commercial project.”
More importantly, it could be a boon for patients.
Researchers and clinicians have worked to develop medicines to mitigate radiation therapy’s tissue damage, but there have been no so-called radioprotectants that doctors routinely use in clinic settings, said Dr. Susannah Ellsworth, clinical associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s radiation oncology department.
“Right now most of our attempts at mitigating toxicity are really centered around getting patients through with good supportive care,” said Ellsworth, who has no connection to the company or its researchers.
Building a potential healer
The Food and Drug Administration recently approved the trials for the company’s proprietary peptide, called XOLacta.
That’s the latest stop in a long journey that began during Gourdie’s years at the University of South Carolina. There, his lab developed a peptide — a chain of chemically bonded amino acids — for basic research, but once scientists there realized that the peptide showed promise as a topical treatment for wound healing, they expanded the map.
A South Carolina company founded by Gautam Ghatnekar, one of Gourdie’s former students, explored its work on the likes of venous leg ulcers and diabetic foot ulcers. Later, Ghatnekar had a revelation.
“About half of patients with cancer undergo radiation therapy, but there’s often pretty dire side effects from the radiation therapy, including skin burns and damage to internal organs,” Gourdie said. “So Gautam, my former student, intuited that maybe the peptide, if it was helping with chronic skin wounds and healing of normal skin wounds, might help with radiation injury.”
Meanwhile, Gourdie had come to work in Roanoke and Blacksburg, where his responsibilities include professorships in biomedical engineering and mechanics, and in the College of Engineering. At his FBRI cardiovascular lab, Gourdie’s team studied how the peptide might mitigate damage from a heart attack.
There are roadblocks to using XOLacta for heart and cancer issues. The medicine would have to get inside the body to do the work, but swallowing it would break it down to the point of uselessness.
The microscopic cargo needed a microscopic ride.
“I started wondering whether we could load the peptide into exosomes and also mitigate radiation injury,” he said. “That’s what set us on the path that the Tiny Cargo company is now on.”
In September 2023, a Richmond-based philanthropic organization, the Red Gates Foundation, gave $50 million to FBRI. Gourdie’s lab received about $3.5 million of that gift, which will pay for the clinical trials that the FDA approved under what it calls the Animal Rule, which allows researchers to test drugs on animals in order to have them approved for use in humans, Gourdie said.
Gourdie also has a $6.5 million Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institutes of Health. He received the seven-year award in 2022. He said he has been concerned about the funding since the Trump administration moved to cancel some of the money, a matter that is in federal appeals court.
“There has been no disruption to this funding,” Gourdie said in a text exchange. “Hoping it continues copacetic till expiry.”
According to the FDA website, developing drugs for acute radiation syndrome is among the accepted circumstances, along with the virus that causes smallpox, inhalation anthrax and exposure to radiation from the likes of a nuclear accident.
In such cases, the FDA may grant approval based on well-controlled animal studies, if the result is liable to benefit humans’ health, but ultimately the studies would have to prove safety to humans.
Hitching a lift to inner space
It turns out that cow milk exosomes can transport peptides.
Exosomes are parts of a cell, essentially vessels within a cell, that are full of proteins, nucleic acids, lipids and metabolites. Cows’ milk cells, for example, secrete these so-called extracellular vesicles to calves, where they impart proteins supporting immunity, growth and more benefits from Bessie.
They are just dozens of nanometers in diameter apiece (for perspective, about 25 million nanometers equal one inch, according to nano.gov).
Tiny Cargo’s principals are among researchers who have found that they also have a lot of potential for humans. They can fortify infant formulas as well as supplements for gut, bone and muscle health, along with topical skin repair, according to multiple scientific publications.
Humans make them, too, but bovines provide the best for this kind of work, researchers say.
Gourdie and Marsh’s team was able to harvest exosomes — they’ve patented their process — and inject them with peptides that could then escape the body’s digestive system and provide therapy. But they found yet another couple of roadblocks.
Their shelf life precludes shipping, much less saving them for use when needed. Lyophilization, or freeze-drying, was an option, but it created clumping that made the product nonfunctional, Marsh said.
One of the lab’s Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine students, Alan Dogan, came up with a solution: an additional additive that spread out the exosomes.
“It’s a sort of flaky powder,” Gourdie said. “Now we ship them freeze-dried and have noticed no reduction in efficacy as a result. In fact, the collaborators keep telling us how much they love working with the powder.”
The lab is working with researchers at the University of Virginia on testing the peptide’s efficiency post-heart attack, protecting the heart muscle from damage that can lead to failure. That work is in its early stages but looks promising, Gourdie said.
Other partners include a group at the University of Indiana doing breast cancer studies and a team at the Cleveland Clinic studying glioblastoma treatment.
Gourdie imagines a future in which Tiny Cargo capsules are part of a soldier’s kit on a post-nuclear battlefield wracked with radiation. The shelf life will be about a year, Gourdie and Marsh said.
“Before I was even here, they showed that the peptide was amazingly effective and you could use it for all these different things, but it degraded so fast in the body that it wasn’t actually functional,” Marsh said. “So then putting in the exosomes was kind of the next step where, OK, now we can get it in there … but it required so much logistical bending over backwards to make it work.
“And this was sort of that last check where now we can produce this, we can make the peptide, put in the exosome, lyophilize it, sit on the shelf, and when people want it, we’re going to ship it.”
Having found the best method to preserve and ship the product, Tiny Cargo is now developing the means of production. The company is renovating a 7,000-square-foot building at Fugate Road Northeast, near Plantation Road, to house clean room space, offices, storage and shipping. The clean room, at 2,000 square feet, will provide a contamination-free environment to work with the materials, and the company might eventually add a second clean room, Marsh said.
The company expects the space to be ready early next year. Once complete, Tiny Cargo will ramp up its business with Franklin County’s Homestead Creamery, taking 250 gallons of milk every week or two. Gourdie and Marsh have been getting unpasteurized milk from the company for about five years.
With Dogan’s additive having sparked the freeze-drying process, the company is looking at the possibility of using the exosomes to deliver “other cargoes,” Marsh said.
“The possibilities have amplified just because of this approach.”