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A who’s-who from the world of synthetic biological
research have come together to launch Senti Biosciences with $53 million in
funding from a veer of venture capital investors.
Led by Tim Lu, a longtime researcher at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the founding fathers of
synthetic biology, Senti’s aim is nothing less than developing therapies that
are modified to an individual’s unique biology — and their first target is
cancer.
Here’s how Lu described a potential cancer treatment
using Senti’s technology to me. “We take a cell derived from humans that we can
insert our genetic circuits into… we insert the DNA and encoding and deliver
those cells via an IV infusion. We have engineered the cells to locate where
the tumors are… What we’ve been doing is engineering those cells to selectively
trigger an immune response against the tumor.”
The adaptive therapies that Senti hopes to develop
will act in a localized area only, be able to sense and respond to the
conditions that diseases create within a body, are able to be controlled
(programmed) at the cellular level and respond to conditions in a variety of
ways.
It’s the culmination of decades of research at
institutions like MIT, the Wyss Institute at Harvard, MD Anderson, Boston
University, ETH Zurich, and other institutions.
“Senti has built a world-class
interdisciplinary team, uniquely capable of tackling the challenge of creating
adaptive therapies,” said Ed Mathers, partner at NEA and member of Senti’s
board of directors, in a statement. “We are excited to support them in their
extraordinary vision to change how difficult diseases are treated.”
New Enterprise Associates actually led Senti’s Series
A round with participation from 8VC, Amgen Ventures, Pear Ventures, Lux
Capital, Menlo Ventures, Allen & Company, Nest.Bio, Omega Funds, Goodman
Capital, and LifeForce Capital.
The company was founded three years ago, when Lu
first had the idea to pull together the research from the world’s top labs into
a single company that would work on developing therapies for cancer — and look
to partner with other companies to create treatments for other diseases.
For Lu, the promise of the CRISPR gene editing
technology — at least for now — lies in its ability to create these kinds of
programmable cells to target disease.
Lu isn’t alone in his belief that CRISPR’s editing
technology holds the key to unlocking cures for some of the deadliest diseases
facing humanity.
“The potential applications of CRISPR are
enormous. It’s the closest we’ve ever come to a cure for cancer. We’ve already
been able to cure HIV infection in animal models, and even in human cell
cultures, by removing the viral genes that insert themselves into our DNA,” the
Australian geneticist and researcher Fahad Ali, wrote in a recent editorial for
The Sydney Morning Herald.
A former computer scientist, Lu explains the CRISPR
technology as a pretty direct corollary to writing code for software. Thinking
of human biological functions as a code, means that many diseases are just
coding errors that can be overwritten with the introduction of new “software”.
That’s essentially what Senti is developing. The use
of gene-editing technologies allows companies like Senti to write new
programmable cells that perform specific functions if certain biological
conditions exist.
ttechman
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