shacking up?

Former Texas electronics giant RadioShack reboots as cryptocurrency company

Could RadioShack make a come back? Photo via Getty Images

Although the RadioShack electronics retail chain essentially crumbled following bankruptcy filings in 2015 and 2017, the name has survived for 100 years. In a bid to make RadioShack relevant for another 100 years, the brand’s new owner is making a play for one of the hottest, and most controversial, emerging business sectors in the world — cryptocurrency.

Seeking to capitalize on RadioShack’s global brand name, Miami-based owner Retail Ecommerce Ventures is propelling RadioShack (once based in Fort Worth) into the promising yet murky territory of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is digital currency built on a technology platform known as blockchain; bitcoin is perhaps the best-known type of cryptocurrency. In November, the size of the global cryptocurrency market surpassed $3 trillion.

“The need for a bridge between the CEOs who control the world’s corporations and the new world of cryptocurrencies will most likely come in the form of a well-known, century-old brand. RadioShack is perfect,” RadioShack proclaims on its website.

High-profile investors like Elon Musk have enthusiastically hopped on the cryptocurrency bandwagon. Yet other big-name investors, such as Warren Buffett, cast doubt on the viability of the scam-prone, highly volatile cryptocurrency market.

The owner of RadioShack clearly shares space on the Musk bandwagon. On its website, RadioShack — whose name still appears on hundreds of stores operated by independent dealers — recently revealed plans for a cryptocurrency platform called RadioShack DeFi (short for decentralized finance). The company touts RadioShack DeFi’s ability to profit from a 100-year-old brand name that’s recognized in more than 190 countries and once encompassed more than 8,000 stores.

The concept calls for people to freely swap existing cryptocurrency tokens for newly created RADIO cryptocurrency tokens through the RadioShack DeFi platform.

“It is our hypothesis that the best way for crypto to be more mainstream is for an established brand name in the tech space to lead the way. … Despite its pullback in the last 10 years, the brand is resolutely embedded in the global consciousness — ripe to be pivoted to lead the way for blockchain tech to mainstream adoption by other large brands,” RadioShack declares.

Retail Ecommerce Ventures bought RadioShack’s brand assets in 2020. The business also owns the ecommerce business of Pier 1, formerly based in Fort Worth, along with obsolete retail brands such as Dressbarn, Linens ’n Things, and Stein Mart.

Interestingly, RadioShack’s cryptocurrency setup would run on a system called Atlas USV that’s owned by entrepreneurs Tai Lopez and Alex Mehr — the same guys who own Retail Ecommerce Ventures and, thus, RadioShack.

“Lopez and Mehr are clearly staking the success of the entire operation on the strength of the RadioShack brand with consumers,” PCMag.com observes.

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

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A research team housed out of the newly launched Rice Biotech Launch Pad received funding to scale tech that could slash cancer deaths in half. Photo via Rice University

A research funding agency has deployed capital into a team at Rice University that's working to develop a technology that could cut cancer-related deaths in half.

Rice researchers received $45 million from the National Institutes of Health's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, to scale up development of a sense-and-respond implant technology. Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh leads the team developing the technology as principal investigator.

“Instead of tethering patients to hospital beds, IV bags and external monitors, we’ll use a minimally invasive procedure to implant a small device that continuously monitors their cancer and adjusts their immunotherapy dose in real time,” he says in a news release. “This kind of ‘closed-loop therapy’ has been used for managing diabetes, where you have a glucose monitor that continuously talks to an insulin pump. But for cancer immunotherapy, it’s revolutionary.”

Joining Veiseh on the 19-person research project named THOR, which stands for “targeted hybrid oncotherapeutic regulation,” is Amir Jazaeri, co-PI and professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The device they are developing is called HAMMR, or hybrid advanced molecular manufacturing regulator.

“Cancer cells are continually evolving and adapting to therapy. However, currently available diagnostic tools, including radiologic tests, blood assays and biopsies, provide very infrequent and limited snapshots of this dynamic process," Jazaeri adds. "As a result, today’s therapies treat cancer as if it were a static disease. We believe THOR could transform the status quo by providing real-time data from the tumor environment that can in turn guide more effective and tumor-informed novel therapies.”

With a national team of engineers, physicians, and experts across synthetic biology, materials science, immunology, oncology, and more, the team will receive its funding through the Rice Biotech Launch Pad, a newly launched initiative led by Veiseh that exists to help life-saving medical innovation scale quickly.

"Rice is proud to be the recipient of the second major funding award from the ARPA-H, a new funding agency established last year to support research that catalyzes health breakthroughs," Rice President Reginald DesRoches says. "The research Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh is doing in leading this team is truly groundbreaking and could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. This is the type of research that makes a significant impact on the world.”

The initial focus of the technology will be on ovarian cancer, and this funding agreement includes a first-phase clinical trial of HAMMR for the treatment of recurrent ovarian cancer that's expected to take place in the fourth year of THOR’s multi-year project.

“The technology is broadly applicable for peritoneal cancers that affect the pancreas, liver, lungs and other organs,” Veiseh says. “The first clinical trial will focus on refractory recurrent ovarian cancer, and the benefit of that is that we have an ongoing trial for ovarian cancer with our encapsulated cytokine ‘drug factory’ technology. We'll be able to build on that experience. We have already demonstrated a unique model to go from concept to clinical trial within five years, and HAMMR is the next iteration of that approach.”

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