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Universal Cancer Treatment Platform

We are developing a novel Universal Cancer Treatment Platform, powered by artificial intelligence, that will be customizable as off-the-shelf injections to treat many types of cancer.

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Our form of treatment is generally known as cancer immunotherapy or therapeutic cancer vaccines.

Our revolutionary approach DETECTS, MARKS, and KILLS only cancer cells. By making cancer cells look like well-immunized diseases, such as measles, we intend to “trick” the body’s immune system into killing cancer cells. Anyone who has had measles or been vaccinated for it, has strong lifetime immunity to the disease. This immunity kills anything that looks like measles immediately upon re-exposure.

Unlike conventional immunotherapies that try to “teach” the immune system how to recognize cancer cells, our approach is a paradigm shift that “tricks” the immune system.

We believe that teaching the immune system is as difficult as “teaching an old dog a new trick.” Instead, we trick the dog into doing something that it knows how to do very well. In the case of the immune system, that’s killing measles.

Our novel approach is a fundamentally different way of thinking about fighting cancer. After countless lives have been lost to cancer, tricking the immune system may be just what the doctors needed.

The Problem​

  • The body’s immune system is very good at killing foreign pathogens, such as the measles virus. Unfortunately, it’s not very good at killing cancer cells, because cancer cells were originally healthy cells. This is why cancer grows undetected by the immune system and is so hard to treat.
  • Other cutting-edge immunotherapies such as personalized cancer vaccines try to teach immune cells, resulting in short lived, weak or patient-specific immune response.  

“Tricking the immune system may be just what the doctors needed”

A Revolutionary Cancer Treatment

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Nanoparticle
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Marker1 + Marker2 = Cancer Cell

The Solution​

  • We are developing a novel technology that will precisely detect cancer cells and force them to produce special proteins to “look” like common diseases for which a strong immunity already exists – such as measles or chickenpox. Then, the immune system will automatically destroy these disguised cancer cells as if they were known foreign pathogens.
  • Our technology is packaged into a nanoparticle that is programmed to seek out only cancer cells and uses a novel 2-step strategy to precisely detect cancer cells.
    • Step 1 - Detect cell surface markers outside the cell (Marker1)
    • Step 2 - Detect cancer genetic signatures inside the cell (Marker2)
Marker1 + Marker2 = Cancer Cell

The Treatment

Cancer Cell Detection​

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Cancer Cell Marking​​

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Cancer Cell Killing​​

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Potential Long-Term Remission

Every day, hundreds of cells in our body acquire cancerous mutations that are immediately destroyed by the immune system. The problem is when mutations occur in oncogene or tumor suppressor genes that do not activate the immune system. This results in unchecked cell growth and cancer becomes a systemic disease.

Other immunotherapies such as personalized cancer vaccines, cytokine therapy or monoclonal antibodies often do not induce a strong enough immune response or last long enough to overwhelm cancer universally.

By “tricking” the body into mounting a strong initial immune response to cancer, like it does with measles, we believe there will be an enhanced immune memory-based secondary response to provide long-term remission.

Once a strong immune response is kicked off by the initial treatment, naïve B-cells and naïve T-cells will be so close to the battle that they will take a snapshot of the cancer neoantigens (proteins) and become memory B and T cells for future battles. This is a normal immune process called epitope spreading or immune broadening. The key to all of this is a strong initial immune response.

The weakness in other immunotherapies is the inability to induce a strong and lasting immune response. By tricking the body into mounting a strong response to measles, we believe the immune system will naturally “learn” what cancer looks like and will continue the fight against that cancer on its own. The new memory T-cells and B-cells can protect the body from future recurrences of the cancer, just like it does with measles.

We intend to prove this out in our pre-clinical research programs.

Reducing Liver and Healthy Tissue Toxicity

Potential Long-Term Remission

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One of the biggest problems with drug delivery today is liver and healthy tissue toxicity. We are addressing this problem in two innovative ways:

1. We are working with world class technology partners to customize a nanoparticle that will avoid accumulation in the liver, as it circulates through the body looking for cancer cells.

2. In the event that the nanoparticles are absorbed by the liver or healthy cells, our Smart mRNA will automatically be turned-off, preventing them from being marked as measles.

Turning “Cold Tumors” into “Hot Tumors”

One of the biggest challenges in immunotherapy, or using the body’s immune system to fight cancer, is that many tumors are considered “cold” tumors. A cold tumor is one that doesn't trigger an immune response. Cold tumors are often surrounded by cells that suppress the immune response, making them resistant to immunotherapy. Typical examples of cold tumors are pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, glioblastoma, and many breast cancers.

Checkpoint inhibitors such as KeytrudaTM, the blockbuster drug from MerckTM, can sometimes “heat up” a tumor by blocking the mechanism that cancers use to evade the immune system (PD-1/PD-L1). But oftentimes, they cannot turn a cold tumor into a hot tumor so that it responds well to immunotherapy.

We believe that by going inside the cancer cell with our nanoparticle, confirming that it is a cancer cell with our Smart mRNA, then disguising the cell as measles, we can turn a cold tumor into a hot tumor because the body has a very strong immune response to measles.

Other immunotherapies have had very limited success trying to teach the immune system how to recognize cancer cells from the outside. Instead, we modify cancer cells from the inside and trick the body into seeing something it recognizes well.

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Cancers can escape immune detection, but measles get caught. That’s the trick we use!

Powered by Artificial Intelligence

Unlike expensive personalized cancer vaccines currently in development by other companies, we do not use tumor biopsies to determine patient specific tumor mutations to create a custom injection for a single patient.

Our universal approach uses proprietary AI algorithms to data mine the ever-growing public database of cancer genetic data to find universal biomarkers to use as Marker1 and Marker2 in our nanoparticle. As a result, our injections only need to be customized for cancer types, not individual patients. This reduces our drug cost dramatically as there are approximately 200 cancer types vs. 8 billion people in the world.

A Customizable Platform for Many Cancers​