How This $100 mRNA Drug Kicked Off A New Era of Medicine
In a Nutshell
Strand Therapeutics, founded in 2017 in Boston's biotech hub, pioneers precise mRNA therapies that activate only in cancer cells, instructing tumors to produce immune-recognizing proteins while sparing healthy tissue. In a skin cancer trial, a single $100-200 dose injection into one metastatic tumor led to all tumors vanishing in a stage-four patient previously given months to live. With scalable manufacturing and plans to expand beyond oncology, Strand aims to usher in a new era of affordable, targeted medicine.
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Boston and Cambridge have an excessive number of top universities, running over with biotech-minded humans. Everyone here seems to have a PhD or two. Nerds are celebrated. Even bike racks are shaped like molecules. Boston can be too sedate and structured. Biotech startups here do not move as fast or take as much risk as Silicon Valley counterparts. The baggage of tradition can be self-defeating. Every now and then, someone thinks big.
Today, our nation has achieved a medical miracle. We have delivered a safe and effective vaccine in just 9 months. A few years ago, there was a pandemic, and mRNA vaccines appeared out of nowhere to thwart it.
I think it's fair to say you guys are trying to cure cancer. Yeah, as a place to start. This is Jake Becraft, co-founder and CEO of Strand Therapeutics. My LinkedIn says 'making medicine move faster.' I 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 was six floors below a startup that had just come out of stealth: Moderna.
Massachusetts-based drug maker Moderna announced its vaccine is nearly 95% effective. They were doing mRNA technology. mRNA is an incredibly promising tech. It is a very fancy way to deliver proteins into a cell. The M in mRNA stands for messenger. mRNA delivers instructions to cells, telling them what proteins to make.
Becraft and co-founders thought they could use mRNA to create very precise medicines. For a cancerous tumor, they want a therapy that goes straight for the tumor and leaves the rest of the 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 kill those cells because we want to take the tumors out. Tumors can be all over the body, deep inside, in the lungs, in the liver, and you don't want the immune system attacking healthy cells. That's where toxicities associated with cancer drugs come from. We want to program the messenger RNA to say, 'I'm inside a cancer cell. I should actuate my program and cause this protein to be produced.' But if it ends up in a liver cell or kidney cell, nothing happens. The program is inert. No protein that causes the immune system to respond is produced. We spent 6 years before the company started working on that tech, and then the last 6 years perfecting it and now taking it into patients.
Some of Strand's most impressive work is from a clinical trial in Australia around skin cancer. Our first program in the clinic has treated about 35 patients so far, most with stage four melanoma resistant to existing therapies. This is from the first cohort starting summer last year. This patient had stage four aggressive metastasis: started with melanoma on skin that metastasized into bones, muscles, and lungs. All smaller black masses are the tumors, showing the absolute extent of disease. We injected our drug into a single one of these tumors, then every 3 weeks the patient comes in. Between one injection and the next, all tumors disappeared. When this patient entered our trial last summer, it was unlikely they would make it to Christmas. Instead, at Christmas last year, they had no detectable tumors. Ideally they're going to see Christmas this year and many more years to come.
This nation was built by people who wanted something bigger and better. They were true founders.
Strand has started with cancer but wants to create mRNA technology for 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.
This is an unstained slide of a very thin section of a patient tumor biopsy. In its current state, it's a white piece of tissue that doesn't reveal much. We combine this 300-year-old technology with our fully automated robotic slide stainer. It dispenses dyes and special reagents onto these slides, designed to identify key biological components in the tumor. The staining process takes 3 to 12 hours, but it's all automated, so load the slides and walk away to high-quality data. Once stained, we use a high-throughput digital scanner, very reproducible and automated. We've added different colors to identify different regions in the tumor. Applied to drug development, we see where our drug is going in the tumor, which cells it affects, and if the tumor is shrinking in real time. It's great to see tumors shrink and disappear from patients. What is really powerful for learning how our drugs work to make them better is peering inside the tumors. With high-throughput technology, we industrialize this process.
Since day one, we knew we need to invest in manufacturing to make these drugs scalable. If a drug costs $50,000 to manufacture to treat cancer, it's hard to get to as many patients as we want. For our trial right now, our drug costs about $100 to $200 per dose. Manufacturing costs will hopefully come down further, but it's incredibly scalable. As seen during the pandemic, you can make mRNA at scale. The vaccines were like $100, and you could build doses for billions of people.
Strand's early results are promising, and the company sits at the intersection of biotech's most important recent breakthroughs. The issue is proving early results can turn into something lasting. With a bit of luck, the company will succeed, and we will have personalized cures like we've never seen before.
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