Company Performance Metrics
- Anne Carpenter: Co-founder, Chair of Scientific Advisory Board
Summary SyzOnc aims to develop therapies for solid tumor patients who have no effective treatment options. Our strategy leverages AI tools, the Cell Painting assay, and unique cell-based models of the tumor microenvironment to identify promising therapeutic leads. We believe our deep knowledge and passion for treating these cancers with major unmet
need will yield next generation targets and therapies.
Founders Founded by experts from the Broad Institute and UPenn, including Anne Carpenter, T. S. Karin Eisinger, and Ashley M. Fuller, our platform integrates world-class cancer and machine learning research. Our strategy leverages AI tools, the Cell Painting assay, and unique cell-based models of the tumor microenvironment to identify promising therapeutic leads. We believe our deep knowledge and passion for treating cancers with major unmet need will yield drugs that reverse their dismal survival rates.
Strategy Our platform integrates curated machine learning techniques, Cell Painting, and specialized bioassays of the tumor microenvironment. This strategy yields high specificity, substantial cost savings, and flexibility to model multiple cancer types. Our next generation target identification approach is to use public and proprietary data to identify multi-modal cancer targets, which are critical to three key areas of tumor growth simultaneously (1. cancer cell proliferation, 2. extracellular matrix regulation, and 3. immune evasion). This strategy leaves behind the traditional and ineffective point solution approach, which chooses targets based on a singular function (generally proliferation). SyzOnc takes a systems level approach, far more appropriate to address the complexities of solid tumor biology. Our first target (“Program 1”) is the Hippo pathway an untapped biological pathway, specifically altered in cancers such as soft-tissue sarcoma, that controls cancer cell expansion, matrix deposition, and T cell function. Our strengths are our deep knowledge of and passion for easing the burden of Hippo pathway-dependent cancers, which lack targeted therapies and show some of the most dismal survival rates.
Next steps We have launched our laboratory space at the B+labs incubator in Philadelphia. We are currently funding in mid-2024 to reach milestones over 2 years to advance our our current platform and program work, and to expand our platform for drug development to additional cancer types.
