The Bio Report

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.

Though the transplantation of insulin-producing islet cells has been used to treat people with type 1 diabetes, such procedures require the use of immunosuppressive drugs to prevent the immune system from rejecting the cells. iTolerance is developing platform technology that can be used with tissue, organoid, and cell therapies without the need for life-long immunosuppression. We spoke to Anthony Japour, president and CEO of iTolerance, about the company’s platform technology that eliminates the need for immunosuppressive drugs with tissue and cell transplantation, the company’s lead experimental cell therapy for type 1 diabetes, and the broad range of regenerative therapies that could benefit from the technology.

Dyadic is working to bridge the gap between high-yield, low-cost, and large-scale industrial biotechnology, and low-yield, high-cost, small-scale biopharmaceuticals. It’s C1 technology, which is a fungal expression system, can efficiently produce enzymes and other proteins. Earlier this year, the company achieved a milestone when it began dosing patients in a phase 1 clinical trial in South Africa of its COVID-19 booster vaccine. The company expects the first-in-human trial to accelerate the adoption of the C-1 production platform for vaccine and therapeutic candidates. We spoke to Mark Emalfarb, president and CEO of Dyadic, about the company’s fungal-based manufacturing platform, how it can product large volumes of enzymes and other proteins in a fast and cost-effective manner, and the potential this has to change the way biologics are manufactured.    

Sam Gambhir understood the ravages of cancer. His wife developed breast cancer and survived. His son later developed brain cancer at the age 15 and died. And in 2020, Gambhir himself succumbed to cancer. Before he died, though, Gambhir, who served as division chief of the Canary Center for Early Cancer Detection and Molecular Imaging at Stanford University, hit upon an idea. Rather than hunt for cancers in the hopes of making an early diagnosis, he devised a way for them to produce synthetic biomarkers to cause them to reveal themselves. He co-founded Earli, which seeks to enable the diagnosis cancers when they are most treatable. We spoke to David Suhy, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Earli, about the company’s synthetic biomarker technology that makes cancers visible with a PET scan, how it works, and how this has the potential to alter outcomes for patients by enabling treatments of patients before their disease progresses.