Irresistible Cancer Therapies with Nick Goldner

Episode Summary: 

Evolution is happening even at the cellular scale. Whether it's a virus, a bacterial pathogen, or a cancer cell, disease-causing agents are responding to the therapies we throw at them, updating their genes and molecular pathways to resist death. As a trained microbiologist, Nick Goldner and his co-founder Chris Bulow spent their years in grad school using -omics data to overcome antibiotic resistance in bacteria which led to their first company Viosera. As they struggled with the harsh realities of the antibiotics market, they stumbled upon the connection between bacterial and cancer resistance mechanisms. With this, they started resistanceBio which combines sophisticated tumoroids, intense patient sampling, and multi-omics to mimic the evolution of real tumors and ultimately find therapies that are irresistible. 

Episode Notes:

About the Author

• Nick Goldner is co-founder and CEO of resistanceBio, a company harnessing evolution to develop therapies that defeat treatment resistant tumors.
• His interest in biotechnology was sparked by his own battle with treatment resistant bacteria.
• Nick and his friend and labmate, Chris Bulow, knew they wanted to start a company and began Viosera to fight antibiotic resistant bacteria as graduate students.
• Recognizing the inherent difficulty of bringing new antibiotics to market, they adapted their technology to cancer and spun-out resistanceBio.

Key Takeaways

• Resistance is very similar in both cancer and bacteria – in response to a drug, both will change their phenotype in a way that reduces its efficacy.
• Traditionally, we understand cancer resistance by growing cancer lines in a dish and evolving them over long periods in a way that is very different from what happens in the body.
• Nick and his team developed ResCu, a method that cultures tumor cells as tumoroids that mimics how a tumor evolves during a patient's course of therapy.
• Combining this with multi-omics, Nick and his team can untangle how the underlying resistance mechanism evolves over time.
• The data that comes from this points resistanceBio toward therapies that will turn these resistances into vulnerabilities.

Impact

• The drugs discovered through resistanceBio’s platform create cancer cures for people who currently have no options.
• The data created through ResCu generate biomarkers ensuring that the right drugs are given to the right people.
• With the foresight of how cancers evolve, resistanceBio could completely overcome the use of chemo and other non-targeted therapies that are hard on patients and instead have completely personalized therapies that are tailored to block all roads to resistance.

Company: 

resistanceBio