2021 INNOVATION AWARDS
MASON GEORGE
LETA NUTT
President, IMC Companies – National Accounts
Founder, Nutt Bio
M
ason George knows a thing or two about trucking and transportation. His father, grandfather, great grandfather, and several uncles all ran their own businesses in the field, so it made sense that he would follow in their footsteps in some capacity. “I grew up listening to all the problems of the trucking world around the dinner table,” laughs George, “so it feels like I’ve been doing this my whole life.” Now president of IMC Companies - National Accounts, he helps lead the largest intermodal drayage company in the United States – and it’s based right here in Memphis. But every industry faces a curveball every now and then, and the coronavirus pandemic meant an unprecedented amount of tension on the supply chain worldwide. Finding a solution meant addressing issues that had already plagued the industry for years, and IMC Companies implementation of peel piles – in which drivers take the first available container at terminal, rather than wait around for hours for specific cargo – through its SmartStack technology meant smoother operations for customers, clients, and delivery drivers. While things had slowed down considerably due to the pandemic, George had been taking note of a transportation problem that had been slowly growing every year for the past decade. “The amount of time that our drivers were spending at the rails and ports trying to get a container out of the terminal was getting longer,” he explains. “Early 2010’s, our drivers would spend less than 20 minutes at these places before taking cargo to their destination. And that’s just slowly crept up over the years to what amounted to an astronomical amount of time. Now, we saw that our drivers were spending upwards of four or five hours at a terminal.” When trucks pull into a terminal looking for a specific container, sometimes their shipment is all the way at the bottom of a stack of cargo, and it takes a long time to unload everything else before they can pick it up. And when the next driver pulls up and sees that their specific shipment is now at the bottom of the new stack, the delays just pile up. Drivers would typically make five or six turns, or deliveries, per day, but that had dropped down to just two. And with many drivers paid or incentivized by the delivery, that just wasn’t going to be sustainable for them, or for anxious customers. George worked with rail and port terminals to address these problems using what he calls one of IMC Companies’ SmartStacks. “We created an app, where drivers can just type in the first available container’s info on their phone, get all the necessary information about where it’s headed, and take it where it needs to be. In terms of the environment, we don’t need a hundred trucks idling at a terminal for hours every day. This helps cut down on our emissions there significantly.” SmartStacks have been implemented in some of IMC Companies’ larger ports, increasing the average number of turns from two to as high as eight. But George sees SmartStacks as a way to kick off a wider industry collaboration and improve overall efficiency in the entire logistics industry. "If we work together to use SmartStacks with our competitors, we can improve the whole ecosystem and make it more efficient for the industry at large." – Samuel X. Cicci 42 • I N S I D E M E M P H I S B U S I N E S S • D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 1
041_MM12_2021_IMB-InnovationAwardsWithText_v001.indd 42
I
t '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 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. 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.” – SXC
ILLUSTRATION BY IKONSTUDIO | DREAMSTIME | MASON GEORGE COURTESY IMC COMPANIES | LETA NUTT BY LATONYA BOUNDS
11/15/21 12:38 PM