They Programmed The Body To Fight Cancer, And It Worked

If you're going to try and cure cancer, this is the place to do it. Thanks to their excessive number of top universities, Boston and Cambridge runneth over when it comes to biotech-minded humans. It seems like everyone here has a PhD or two. Nerds are celebrated. Even the bike racks are shaped like molecules. There is truth that Boston can be too sedate and structured. The biotech startups here do not tend to move as fast or take as much risk as their Silicon Valley counterparts. The baggage of tradition can be self-defeating. Every now and then, though, someone does think quite big. And we're gonna tell you the story of such a person. I have really good news. Today, our nation has achieved a medical miracle. We have delivered a safe and effective vaccine in just 9 months. I don't know if you guys remember, but a few years ago there was a pandemic. And then there were these mRNA vaccines that appeared out of nowhere.

Oh, do it again!

And they were meant to thwart the pandemic. And then people kind of lost their minds.

Are you a vaccinated person?

I'm not answering that. It would be a lot of fun to spend the next half hour going through the pros and cons of the vaccines. I'm sure the engagement in the comments section would be fruitful and rewarding. I was a guy who did not want the COVID vaccine, but I do want research on mRNA. Sure. But we're going to go ahead and fast forward to the future of mRNA, and we're going to do it with this man. I think it's fair to say You guys are trying to cure cancer.

Yeah, as a, as a place to start.

Yeah. This is Jake Becraft, the co-founder and CEO of Strand Therapeutics.

My LinkedIn, the first thing that it says is making medicine move faster. I really view mRNA as the future infrastructure of medicine, and that's what we're building.

Founded in 2017, Strand was working on mRNA technology before the world knew it was a thing.

I moved to Boston to do my PhD starting in 2013. My PhD lab that I joined, 6 floors up, there was this startup that had just come out of stealth. They were called Moderna.

There is more hope on the way in the nation's fight against COVID-19.

Massachusetts-based drugmaker Moderna announcing its vaccine is nearly 95% effective. They were doing mRNA technology, and we thought mRNA is this incredibly promising tech. It essentially is a very fancy way to deliver proteins into a cell.

The M in mRNA stands for messenger. This is because mRNA delivers instructions to your cells, telling them what proteins to make. Beechcraft and his co-founders have long thought that they could use mRNA to create very precise medicines. If, for example, you have a cancerous tumor, They want to make a therapy that goes straight for the tumor and leaves the rest of your body alone.

We're trying to get the mRNA to go into the tumors, have the tumors create a protein that the immune system will then recognize and come and kill those cells, because we want to take the tumors out. The tumors can be all over the body. They can be deep inside of the body. They can be in the lungs. They can be in your liver. And you don't want the immune system attacking any of the healthy cells. That's where where you get, you know, all sorts of toxicities that are associated with cancer drugs. And so we want to program the messenger RNA to be able to say, "I'm inside of a cancer cell. I should actuate my program and cause this protein to be produced." But if it ends up in the liver cell or in a kidney cell, then nothing happens. The program is inert. No protein that causes the immune system to respond is going to be produced. And that is Tech is very difficult. We spent 6 years before the company started working on that tech, and then we spent the last 6 years here really perfecting it and now taking it into patients.

Some of Strand's most impressive work to date has come through a clinical trial in Australia around skin cancer.

Our first program that's in the clinic right now has treated about 35 patients so far, most of whom have, you know, stage 4 melanoma resistant to existing therapies. This is from the first cohort of patients we treated starting summer of last year. So this patient had stage 4 aggressive metastasis, started with melanoma on their skin that then had metastasized into their bones, into their muscles, and into their lungs. All of these smaller black masses are the tumors in this patient. And you can see just the absolute extent of disease that this patient was dealing with. And so we went in with our drug injected into, you know, a single one of these tumors. And then every 3 weeks the patient comes in. So what happened between here and what I'm about to show you, when the patient had come back in, in between one of their injections, all of their tumors disappeared.

It's gotta be insane when you see this for the first time.

Yeah. You know, when this patient entered our trial last summer, it was probably unlikely they were gonna make it to Christmas. And instead, at Christmas last year, they had no detectable tumors. And ideally they're gonna see Christmas this year and many more years to come.

Yeah, very cool. In a moment, we shall head into Strand's labs. But before we do, let's have the briefest of looks at Boston's rich history. There's this scenic place and this monument and this monument and old Ben Franklin. This nation was built by people who wanted something bigger and better. They were true founders. Be like a founder and switch to Brex. Oh, do you need these?

I forgot my badge. I don't know if your badges will work for our lab or not.

Thank you. And we're back.

Cool.

Strand has started with cancer, but it wants to create mRNA technology that can go after a wide variety of diseases.

I don't view us as an oncology company. I view us as demonstrating success in oncology to start in order to help develop this new era of medicine.

It's inside these labs where it's trying to build the machinery that could make mRNA therapies mainstream.

So this is an unstained slide of a very thin section of a patient tumor biopsy.

Okay.

Now in its current state, this is a white piece of tissue, doesn't really reveal much. But what we are trying to do is really combine this 300-year-old technology with our fully automated robotics slide stainer.

And what, it just puts like a dye?

Yeah, it is dispensing dyes and special reagents onto these slides. And these dyes are designed to identify some key biological components in the tumor.

Okay.

And the staining process can take 3 to 12 hours, but this is all automated, so one can just load the slides and walk away and really come back to high-quality data. So once the slides are all stained, we bring them here, and this is our really high-throughput digital scanner. Again, very reproducible and automated. And what we've done is we've added different kinds of colors to identify different regions in the tumor. And when we apply this to drug development, we can really see where our drug is going in the tumor, which cells it is affecting, and if the tumor is shrinking in real time.

It's great to see the tumor shrink. It's great to see the tumors disappear from patients. What is really powerful though, in terms of learning about these medicines and trying to make sense of how our drugs are working so we can make them even better in the future, is peering inside of the tumors. And what we're able to do with this sort of high-throughput technology is really industrialize this process. Since day one, we knew we need to invest in manufacturing. We need to figure out how to make these drugs scalable. And if we have a a drug that costs $50,000 to manufacture to treat cancer, that's gonna be hard to get to as many patients as we want to.

If we took the example of the melanoma treatment, how much would that cost in 10 years?

For our trial right now, our drug costs about $100 to $200 per dose. So our manufacturing costs hopefully will come down even further with time, but right now it's, you know, incredibly scalable. As we saw during the pandemic, you can make mRNA at scale. The vaccines were like $100, right? And you were able to build doses for billions of people at that scale.

Strand's early results are promising, and the company sits at the intersection of biotech's most important recent breakthroughs. The issue, per usual, is proving that the early results can be turned into something lasting. With a bit of luck, the company will be a success, and the rest of us will have personalized cures the likes of which we've never seen before.