Ashlee VanceNYT Best Seller | Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

They’re Making a $100 Cancer Drug. #science #biology #bio #medicine #cancer

3 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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In this interview excerpt, Jake Becraft, co‑founder and CEO of Strand Therapeutics, describes the company’s approach to creating highly precise cancer medicines using messenger RNA (mRNA). The strategy is to deliver mRNA that only becomes active inside cancer cells, prompting those cells to produce a protein that flags them for the immune system. This tumor‑specific activation aims to eliminate tumors throughout the body while sparing healthy tissue, thereby avoiding the toxic side‑effects common with conventional cancer drugs. Becraft notes that the concept required six years of foundational research before Strand was founded, followed by another six years of refinement, and the technology is now moving into patient trials.

I think it's fair to say you guys are trying to cure cancer. Yeah, as a place to start. Yeah.
This is Jake Becraft, the co-founder and CEO of Strand Therapeutics. Becraft 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 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 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.