Many biotech startups are arriving in the market. A UK biotech startup just raised $16M for innovative cell therapies. Now, another biotech startup, ArsenalBio is looking to cure cancer. The story of the company starts with Sean Parker’s Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. The institute was founded in 2016 and it provides a platform for the top researchers to collaborate and communicate with each other. This also helps in doing groundbreaking research in different fields.
It was in these meetings that the top researchers started talking about the cancer diagnosis. The names of the researchers were W. Nicholas Haining, the vice president of discovery oncology at Merck Research Laboratories; Dr. Bradley Bernstein, a professor of pathology at the Board Institute; E. John Wherry, a professor of immunology at the University of Pennsylvania; and Dr. Alexander Mason, an associate professor of immunology at the University of California. They discussed the diagnosis, therapies, and technologies to find a cure for cancer.
Beth Seidenberg, the founder of Village BioPartners and investor in ArsenalBio, states, “I look at this as a force which brings researchers from different fields together, to form a dream management team.” Just like the researchers, the management team is also quite impressive. The founding partner of Kleiner Perkins, Brooke Byers hired Dr. Ken Drazan to become a consultant to the company. However, now Drazan is the chief executive of the company. Previously, he was the president of the cancer research and diagnostic startup Grail. Moreover, he has also been a founder and chief executive of several medical companies and healthcare startups.
After Drazan, the company also hired other team members, which included, Michael Kalos, the former vice president of cell therapies at Janssen Oncology; Jane Grogan, the former principal scientist at Genentech; and Tarjei Mikkelsen, the former vice president at 10x Genomics.
ArsenalBio was initially a shell company. It got seed financing from different investors in 2018. Other than the powerful staff and management team, the company has just raised $85 million in funding from top investors. Moreover, some popular investors include Westlake Village, Euclidean Capital, Osage University Partners, the University of California San Francisco Foundation Investment Company, Kleiner Perkins, and the Sean Parker’s Institute of Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI).
Now let us look at the company’s plans to fight cancer. The main idea is to improve the ability of the T cells to fight different cancers efficiently. The T cell treatments have shown good results with certain cancer types. However, they haven’t been successful in treating solid tumors. To tackle tumors, doctors need to find a way to deliver T cells around the tumor and then to the tissues, where the tumor is spreading. This requires some biological instructions, which scientists haven’t discovered yet.
T cells are the natural response of the human body to fight diseases and infections. Cancer turns off the response by signaling to the cells that they should ignore the tumor. Drazan states, “Cancer turns off the response of T cells, so our main goal here is to form a biological mechanism to instruct the cells to ignore the instructions from the tumor.”
Drazan states that the company is developing its product strategies. However, ArsenalBio will be selling two different technologies. The first will be the medicines to cure different cancer forms. Moreover, the second will be to produce some genes that counter the signals from the tumors that obstruct the normal functioning of the T cells.
Drazan says that these sequences will be like programs on GitHub. Thus, other researchers and companies could use these genes and do further research or develop their treatments.
Sean Parker, ArsenalBio director and founder of PICI, said in a statement, “ArsenalBio allows us to rewrite code to deliver new instructions to the T cells. This means that we can make these cells effective in curing cancer and a variety of other diseases. I am proud that ArsenalBio has been made with the cooperation of PICI investigators who worked across hospitals, research centers, and universities. This company’s existence is proof of the fact that when we collaborate and put the patients first, we can quickly implement the theories into practice.”
