A Dramatic New Approach To Fighting Cancer
This is a free preview of Porter & Co.’s Tech Frontiers. In the full issue, analyst Erez Kalir details a biotech company, led by a successful serial entrepreneur, that offers huge promise in the fight against cancer – and an ever bigger opportunity for investors. To get the full issue, click here.
In the mid-1990s, a young surgeon at UCLA Medical School began to notice something unsettling about the way the medical community treated cancer.
The surgeon was Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, then a rising transplant specialist whose work involved moving organs from one human body to another. Transplant surgery offers an unusually intimate view of the immune system in action. Every transplant is essentially a race between two opposing forces: the patient’s immune system trying to reject the foreign organ and physicians attempting to modulate that response just enough to allow the organ (and the patient) to survive.
Watching these immune battles unfold day after day gave Dr. Soon-Shiong a paradoxical insight that would shape the rest of his career. The human immune system was extraordinarily powerful – capable of rejecting a new organ within hours – yet in cancer patients it often seemed strangely paralyzed, allowing malignant cells to grow unchecked. Even more troubling, many standard cancer treatments appeared to make the problem worse. Chemotherapy and radiation might shrink tumors in the short term, but they often did so by crushing the very immune cells that might otherwise help the body finish the job.
He eventually left academia to pursue a new idea: that modern medicine needed therapies capable of working with the immune system rather than simply attacking tumors directly.
His first great success came through the development of an innovative albumin-bound formulation of a chemotherapy drug that improved delivery of the medicine directly into tumors while reducing toxicity. He sold the business for $2.9 billion.
Most entrepreneurs might have retired at that point. This surgeon instead turned back to the question that had first gripped him in the transplant ward: how to harness the immune system itself as a coordinated weapon against cancer.
This effort eventually led him to found a biotechnology company built around a bold thesis: that cancer is a disease not only of uncontrolled cell growth, but also of the immune system’s failure to recognize and destroy malignant cells. At the center of that thesis is a pathbreaking therapy designed to restore and amplify the immune system’s natural cancer-fighting machinery.
If this vision proves correct, the creation may prove not to be another innovative oncology drug. It may help instead usher in a new paradigm in cancer treatment.
This is the huge opportunity we are looking at today.
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