Meeting Bruce Line was a seminal moment in Michael Schultz’s career that catapulted him into decades of exploration into a new, cutting-edge treatment for cancer. 

Schultz recalls publishing some papers on a rare alpha-emitting isotope and Line, the head of nuclear medicine at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, took notice, saying that the alpha emitter could be used for cancer therapy.

Line had already started researching the idea and called to see if Schultz wanted to collaborate. 

“I was in my office at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and went over to the University of Maryland a couple weeks later and never looked back. … I went over there and he was a really inspiring guy, and he was a mentor. He passed away from colon cancer not too long after that, but he had inspired me in a way to keep working [on it],” Schultz said.

Schultz, a University of Iowa associate professor emeritus of radiology and free radical and radiation biology, built a research laboratory at the university with the main research focus of developing a new type of radiation treatment for cancer. In 2015, he spun out a company to continue the work — Perspective Therapeutics. 

Today, Schultz, Perspective co-founder and chief science officer, said the company’s 130-person team has “created an approach to cancer therapy that is highly personalized,” with an expectation that side effects like nausea and hair loss will be much better than normal chemotherapeutics.

“This is what we believe,” he said. “In theory this personalized approach to precision medicine can improve outcomes for cancer patients with fewer side effects. We’re in clinical trials to prove that, but that’s what we believe.” And, “theoretically, it has this potential to when it interacts with a cancer cell, it has a much higher probability of causing cell death,” Schultz said. 

“The reality is that our brand of radiation therapy is very different from the current paradigm, which has been used effectively for a long time,” he said.

The radiation that’s been used previously is external beam radiation, he said, which kills cancer from the outside in, “but it also has to travel through healthy tissue to get there. … so you’re damaging healthy tissue along the way.”

Perspective’s treatment is an injection that directs the radiation to the cancer cells, killing the cancer from the inside out. 

“Our clinical trials are painting a picture that this looks like we’ve got an active drug that can be very safe,” he said. “It’s all trying to get more precise and more precise and more precise.”

What’s unique to this treatment compared to other cancer therapy is you administer an imaging drug first, he said.

“That is just there to give you information about the drug’s biodistribution and how it’s going to clear the other organs,” Schultz said. “And that’s really powerful information if it can help you understand, ‘Do you have a drug that will be effective?’”

He said using the imaging, you can get that information without having to do a therapeutic trial; with normal cancer drugs, you need to do a clinical trial to know what’s going to happen.

“But we can get very important information about how our drug is behaving with a pharmacologically benign diagnostic that has the exact same biodistribution and clearance and tumor targeting properties as the therapy,” he said.

Schultz said the company currently has two clinical trials that are open with two different products and a third product that is “just getting ready to enter the clinic.”

“[The] average for an oncology drug to go from the first injection and clinical trials to commercialization is something like 9½ years,” he said. “So we’re well on our way with two of our compounds and just starting on another one.”

This treatment has the potential to improve many lives, Schultz said.

“We’ll expand to as many cancers as possible to have the biggest impact that we can possibly have,” he said. 

He pointed to Iowa having one of the highest rates of cancer in the nation.

Iowa continues to have the second highest age-adjusted rate of new cancers diagnosed nationwide, according to the Iowa Cancer Registry. 

The 2025 Cancer in Iowa report found that an estimated 21,200 new, invasive cancers will be diagnosed among Iowans in 2025 and an estimated 6,300 Iowans will die from cancer in 2025.

“We took roots in Iowa,” Schultz said. “And so it means a lot to us to contribute to the community, and this is one of the ways that we … had our hopes and dreams when we started the company was to … have an impact on people’s lives right here in our state, and certainly the outcome of development of the radio pharmaceuticals can be a big part of that.