Granza Bio's Cancer Targeting Attack Particles

Technology has continued to revolutionize cancer research and treatments, ranging from DNA sequencing and AI-based drugs to precision medicine and robotic surgery. These breakthroughs are undoubtedly accelerating medical advances against the deadly disease, as proven by cancer mortality rates in the US that have continued to slowly decline.

However, according to the American Cancer Society, there is still minimal progress in cancer prevention and in reducing cancer disparities. Most existing cancer treatments also still bring negative side effects to patients due to their unpreventable destructive nature not only on cancer cells but on healthy, surrounding cells as well.

Granza Bio, a YC-backed startup founded by Ashwin Jainarayanan and Ashwin Nandakumar, aims to make a change in cancer therapy, treatment, and care by developing attack particles, a therapeutic, targeted treatment product that specifically targets and eliminates cancer cells without unwanted toxicity.

Adverse Effects of Cancer Treatments

Deemed some of the most effective cancer treatments developed so far, precision medicine-based methods such as immunotherapy and CAR-T cell therapy work quite differently from the more commonly found chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

When chemo and radiation are performed aggressively, most times treating cancer with more immediate impact but leaving patients with an abundance of negative side effects as they actively attack healthy cells in the process, immunotherapy and CAR-T cell therapy tend to be more methodical.

The two take a longer period of time to reach recovery but are able to target destructive cancer cells with more precision. By boosting the body’s immune system and essentially teaching it how to identify and destroy cancer cells, CAR-T therapy has been used to treat more advanced leukemias and lymphomas.

Similarly, Granza Bio’s manufactured attack particles utilize proteins derived from our body’s immune system, namely perforin and granzyme. However, Granza Bio’s attack particles, deemed as targeted treatment, are designed to specifically target cancer cells without at all harming healthy cells surrounding them.

Improved Precision

By relying on proteins that naturally exist in the immune system, the body is offered a sense of familiarity and isn’t required to process any invasive or foreign substances. Though immunotherapy and CAR-T cell therapy share a similarity in terms of this, Granza Bio believes that these precision medicine treatments are still not effective enough.

According to Granza Bio’s founders, who are Ph.D. graduates in Oncology and Immunology and have conducted extensive research on the subject, the treatments’ meticulous nature allows them to perform perfectly on most patients. However, they still result in similar adverse side effects as chemo and radiation, though with less severity, for many. The treatments inevitably impact patients’ healthy tissues, leaving behind plenty of undesirable toxicity. Granza Bio also believes that this ineffectiveness is one of the leading causes of cancer relapses, especially for late-stage cancer patients.

The startup’s attack particles, on the other hand, are said to act as cancer therapeutics engineered to selectively target and kill cancer cells without disrupting healthy cells and tissues. This is due to perforin and granzyme’s natural function of mediating the apoptosis, essentially the slow death, of targeted cells. The function entails the removal of abnormal and potentially harmful or virus-infected cells by running a series of molecular steps that induce their death.

Granza Bio claims that by utilizing these proteins and protecting them with a thrombospondin protein shell, a powerful suite of weapons with high cancer-killing efficacy for brain, ovarian, lung, and skin cancers has been made. The attack particles’ highly stable and precise nature is what allows them to lock cancer cells as specific targets to attack, thus way avoiding healthy cells and removing any chance of negative and toxic side effects on patients.

The attack particles are said to be easily manufactured and engineered, making their widespread adoption in the future seemingly conceivable. The startup has also suggested a degree of versatility seen in the particles, possibly allowing them to be used not only on cancer but on other autoimmune diseases and infections as well. With this synthetic biotech, the boundaries of treatments and care for fatal illnesses have only become broadened.

Source: Granza Bio

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