How Cairn Biosciences is overcoming acquired resistance to cancer therapy

Four minutes, four slides. That’s all the start-up entrepreneurs had to pitch their companies to a panel of judges at the Xcelerate Startup Pitch competition, hosted by EBD Group at this year's Biotech Week Boston. 

The pitch competition is designed to give early stage companies exposure to possible investors and partners, and is judged by top venture capitalists and industry experts. The panel awarded Cairn Biosciences CEO Mary Ludlam with second runner up for Best Business Plan.

BWB TV spoke to her after to her after to hear how Cairn is developing next-generation therapeutics that address significant challenges in the treatment of cancer, discovering new tools to decipher cellular complexity and enable development of groundbreaking therapies.

How did company first start?

'Cairn Biosciences is a San Francisco based startup company, and we are focused on overcoming acquired resistance to cancer therapy. We've spent the last four years at Cairn building a novel platform approach to addressing this problem.

Cancer cells are poised to evolve resistance to targeted therapies that we've designed to treat them. We now have over 100 FDA approved targeted cancer drug therapies on the market. And so acquired resistance is an ever growing problem that we're going to need to address both from an industry standpoint, and more importantly for patients who will eventually relapse against our efforts to treat them.'

And where are you at this point?

'At this point, we've spent the less three years or using non-diluted funding, approaching $8 million of non-diluted funding from the NIH, NSF, and also biopharm collaborations, to build up our platform, which is a technology enabled platform comprising advances in synthetic biology, cutting edge advances in microfluidics. And also an analytics component. So, we're essentially positioned now ready to scale and drive this towards overcoming resistance for our initial target indication.'

For any new company partnering is important. Do you have a partnering strategy? Do you already work with some partners?

'So, we've had some initial collaborations with several different biopharm collaborators. Part of the reason for attending this event was to indeed leverage the partnering system, connect with new people with stated interests in this therapeutic area. And assess the appetite that they might have for working with us. And that's been a productive exercise the last couple of days.'

And looking to the future, where do you see yourselves in a years time for example? Or ultimately where's that end goal?

'I think within a years time we'd be very happy to have a lead identified and progressing towards clinical trials. We're hoping to have a Phase I ready compound towards the end of 2020, or maybe early 2021. Longer term, because this is a platform we're excited about the possibility to apply this other areas of cancer drug discovery. But also other therapeutic areas beyond that. We have a couple of exciting opportunities in the neurology space that we're gearing up to make sure we're ready to capitalize on when the time comes. So, our longer term vision for Cairn is to build a company that has a pipeline of therapies that are truly delivering an extensive benefit to patients that need them.

This interview was filmed as part of BWB TV at Biotech Week Boston in September 2018. Biotech Week Boston 2019 is taking place in Boston, MA on September 9-12, 2019. Find out more here.