Founded
in 2016, the Institute has been instrumental in providing a space for
the top researchers into cancer across different fields to collaborate
and communicate on the latest breakthroughs in settings that range from
formal meetings to informal retreats.
It was at one of these
informal retreats that luminaries like Dr. Bradley Bernstein, a
professor of pathology and researcher at the Broad Institute; W.
Nicholas Haining, vice president of discovery oncology at Merck Research
Laboratories; Dr. Alexander Mason, an associate professor of immunology
at the University of California San Francisco; and E. John Wherry, a
professor of systems immunology at the University of Pennsylvania, began
to talk about the current state of the art in cancer diagnostics and
therapies and the technologies powering cell-based therapies to
potentially cure cancer.
Parker suggested that rather than have
each of these researchers spin their technologies out into separate
companies that would develop one discrete innovation that would be
needed to get to a cell-based therapy for solid tumors, the researchers
should combine forces and build an arsenal of tools for the discovery
and development of potential cures.
“I
look at this as a tour de force of a combination of bringing academics
together who typically would start separate companies and get them
working together with a dream team management team,” says Beth
Seidenberg, the founder of Westlake Village BioPartners and an investor
in ArsenalBio.
Indeed, the management team is just as
impressive as the researchers behind the project. Kleiner Perkins
founding partner Brooke Byers recruited Dr. Ken Drazan to serve as a
consultant to the company as it was getting off the ground. Drazan, now
the company’s chief executive, was the former president of the cancer
research and diagnostics startup Grail and has served as an executive
and founder at a number of healthcare startups and large medical
companies.
With Drazan on board, the company quickly recruited the rest of the management team: Jane Grogan, the former principal scientist in charge of adaptive tumor and cell therapy at Genentech; Michael Kalos, the former vice president of immuno-oncology and cell therapies at Janssen Oncology; and Tarjei Mikkelsen, the former vice president of biology at 10x Genomics.
With Drazan on board, the company quickly recruited the rest of the management team: Jane Grogan, the former principal scientist in charge of adaptive tumor and cell therapy at Genentech; Michael Kalos, the former vice president of immuno-oncology and cell therapies at Janssen Oncology; and Tarjei Mikkelsen, the former vice president of biology at 10x Genomics.
ArsenalBio initially formed as a shell company with
seed financing from investors in 2018, basically on the back of its
technical team and nascent executive staff.
Alongside
the powerhouse executive team and scientific founders, ArsenalBio has
now raked in $85 million in financing from investors including Westlake
Village, the PICI, Kleiner Perkins, the University of California San
Francisco Foundation Investment Company, Euclidean Capital and Osage
University Partners.
The idea is to improve the ability of T cell
therapies to fight a broader range of cancers more effectively. T cell
treatments have already shown amazing promise with certain types of
cancer, but have not been able to effectively treat the solid tumors
that represent the deadliest manifestation of the disease.
To
tackle solid tumors like sarcomas, carcinomas and lymphomas, doctors
need to figure out how to deliver the T cells first to the area around
the tumor and then to the right tissues where the tumor is spreading.
That requires a set of biological instructions, which, in many cases
have yet to be discovered.
“We need to get the cells to deal with the tumor microenvironment,” says Seidenberg.
T
cells are the human body’s natural response to fighting off infections
and disease. Cancers essentially turn off that natural immune response
by signaling to the cells that a tumor is actually something they should
ignore rather than attack.
“Our
goal is to program [cells] by delivering additional instructions to
tell the T cell to ignore the instructions from the tumor… to ignore the
signals,” says Drazan.
The company is still developing
its first product strategies now, Drazan says. But ArsenalBio will be
selling two different types of technologies. The first will be the
medicines themselves that will be used to cure certain types of cancer.
The second will be the sequences of genes that can be used to counteract
or override the signals that are coming from different types of tumors
which prohibit T cells from performing their normal functions.
Drazan
compared those sequences to programs on GitHub that other researchers,
clinicians and companies could use to develop their own therapies.
“ArsenalBio
allows us to rewrite vast stretches of code to give T cells dramatic
new functions — that means they can be made to be more effective at
killing cancer and a broad spectrum of other diseases,” said Sean
Parker, founder and chairman of PICI and ArsenalBio director, in a
statement. “It’s also very rewarding to see ArsenalBio born from the
deep collaboration of PICI investigators — who worked together across
research centers, hospitals and universities on the science behind these
technologies. The company’s very existence demonstrates how much faster
and better we can get therapies from bench to bedside when we
collaborate and put patients first.”
Source. TechCrunch, Johnathan Schreiber, October 17, 2019
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This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.
Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.
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