The Bio Report

About 20 years ago, the number of people dying from chronic diseases surpassed the number of people dying from infectious ones. Though vaccines have contributed to this shift, they’ve generally not been harnessed to address chronic conditions. Vaxxinity is seeking to change that by using vaccine technology to address the growing burden of chronic diseases. It’s advancing a new class of synthetic, peptide-based vaccines designed to activate the body’s immune system to produce antibodies to neurodegenerative, cardiovascular and other chronic diseases. The company’s pipeline includes experimental therapies for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and hypercholesterolemia. We spoke to Mei Mei Hu, CEO of Vaxxinity, about the case for using vaccines to address chronic diseases, the benefits this approach provides, and how its platform technology activates the immune system to battle non-communicable diseases.      

Developing therapies that work by degrading disease-causing proteins has shown promise, but first-generation approaches have been limited to targeting intracellular proteins and can’t reach membrane and extracellular proteins that represent about 40 percent of the proteome. EpiBiologics is working to expand protein degradation therapies to include membrane and extracellular targets with the goal of eliminating disease-causing proteins that were previously not addressable by traditional therapeutic approaches. We spoke to Rami Hannoush co-founder and interim CEO and president of EpiBiologics, about the company’s platform technology, how its protein degradation approach expands the potential targets for its therapies; and how its built an atlas of tissue-specific degrader antibodies to target proteins involved in cancer, immunologic-, and neurologic-related conditions.

While many people think of biotechnology in terms of its impact on medicine, it’s expected to transform the economy as its power reaches across industries. As biology increasingly becomes an engineering discipline, it is not only reshaping the way we produce food, but a wide range of industrial products as well. Bio-based processes are replacing petroleum-based ones and giving life to new biomaterials, bioplastics, and biofuels. As the SynBioBeta Global Synthetic Biology Conference returns to Oakland, California May 23 to May 25, we spoke to SynBioBeta Founder and CEO John Cumbers, about the state of the emerging bioeconomy, how biotechnology is being embraced across industries, and the unexpected places biotechnology is already showing up.

One reason that cancers can be difficult to treat is that the tumor microenvironment can hamper the ability of drugs to penetrate the tumor and facilitate the development of resistance to medicines. AUM Biosciences is developing targeted therapies that address genetic drivers of a cancer and can disable defenses that hide tumors from the immune system. The company’s lead experimental therapy is being tested in combination with immunotherapies to treat colorectal cancer and other solid tumors. We spoke to Vishal Doshi, chairman and CEO of AUM, about the development of resistance in cancers, the case of combining precision therapies with immunotherapies, and why he believes we can transform cancer from a deadly condition to a chronic disease.

While there has been great interest in harvesting and targeting the microbiome to treat disease, Federation Bio believes for durable benefits its necessary to provide a rich ecosystem of microbes in a single therapy. The company has developed a platform for producing synthetic microbial cell therapies to treat a range of diseases from metabolic disorders to metastatic cancers. Unlike earlier approaches, the company said it is generating potent, reproducible, and complete microbial consortia that stably engraft to provide predictable and durable responses. We spoke to Emily Drabant Conley, CEO of Federation Bio, about its platform technology, how it determines what to include or exclude in a given therapy, and what makes a disease a good candidate for its living therapeutics approach.

One of the challenges of treating traumatic injuries and degenerative conditions is that while there are therapeutic proteins that can promote repair, they can be difficult to deliver to the site of damage and get them to stay there long enough to provide benefit. Therapdaptive has developed platform technology that enables it to produce variants of recombinant proteins that can bind to the surface of implants, devices, and injectable carriers to allow for precision delivery anywhere in the body. We spoke to Luis Alvarez, CEO of Theradaptive, about the company’s platform technology to produce recombinant proteins that bind to materials, the broad applications for the technology, and how the roots of the company go back to a need he saw during his service in the Iraq war.

In 2022, investment in biopharmaceutical companies, pipeline activity, and the launch of novel medicines all dropped from the previous year. A new report from IQVIA’s Institute for Human Data Sciences argues the downturn, after two record-setting years, is a post pandemic return to longer-term trends. We spoke to Murray Aitken, executive director of the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, about what happened to the biopharmaceutical sector in 2022, how to make sense of the data, and the shifting landscape in therapeutic and geographic investments.

The aging process is associated with the development of diseases. BioAge Labs is seeking to expand healthy lifespans by developing therapies for aging-related diseases that target key pathways involved in the aging process. The company has built a platform that combines systems biology and AI to leverage extensive data sets to uncover molecular drivers of aging-related diseases. We spoke to Kristen Fortney, CEO of BioAge, about the company's approach to identifying targets for aging-related diseases, its therapeutic pipeline, and whether it's pursuing any novel targets yet.

Cell therapies are revolutionizing the way cancers are treated, but existing cell therapies have their limits. They have been more successful at treating hematologic tumors than solid tumors, and they can sometimes cause serious side effects, such as the destruction of antibodies or what’s known a cytokine storms in which the immune system gets over-revved and attacks healthy cells. Triumvira Immunologics is developing autologous and allogenic T cell therapies that it believes can address the limitations of existing cell therapies and be used to treat both liquid and solid tumors. We spoke to Paul Lammers, CEO of Triumvira, about the company’s platform technology, why it’s robust and versatile, and why its lead indication is for a cancer where effective treatments already exist.

A complex of proteins that play an essential role in regulating the innate immune system known as the NLRP3 inflammasome is becoming a growing target of interest among drug developers to disrupt immune cell signaling. Halia Therapeutics is developing a pipeline of therapies that target the NLRP3 inflammasome to address not only inflammatory disorders like psoriasis and colitis, but neurologic conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. We spoke to David Bearss, president and CEO of Halia, about the NLRP3 inflammasome, the role it plays in Alzheimer’s and other neurologic conditions, and the case for this therapeutic approach.