9Bio Therapeutics co-founder, president, and chief scientific officer Philipe Gobeil envisions a future where fewer cancer patients need to choose between painful, toxic therapies that give them a chance of a cure, or spending their limited remaining time with loved ones without the stress of treatment.
Gobeil hopes to make that possible for some patients with his diverse, multidisciplinary team at 9Bio. The Québec City-based biotechnology startup’s small staff includes CEO Henrique de Carvalho, an accountant and MBA, a structural biologist, an artificial intelligence (AI) specialist, and an organic chemist. Gobeil, with his oncology and immunology background, has shepherded several drugs from discovery to clinic, while Carvalho has helped bring four therapies from development to commercial launch.
“A lot of [cancer patients] are in a lot of pain when they don’t have to be.”
Philipe Gobeil,
9Bio Therapeutics
They are applying their combined expertise and “complementary skill sets” in oncology, drug development, and commercialization to developing an AI-guided structural biology platform that 9Bio plans to use to design therapies that selectively target tumours and spare healthy tissues.
9Bio was among the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) graduate companies that presented at Super Session earlier this week.
Gobeil sat down with BetaKit at the event to unpack 9Bio’s strategy for creating future cancer treatments he says will help the “duct tape” of the human body hold on a bit longer, how the startup plans to “save or resurrect” clinically validated therapies that failed due to toxic side effects, and why he believes his company’s approach could be less risky and faster than other biotech firms’.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What problem is 9Bio trying to solve and how?
We’re really trying to address on-target, off-tumour binding for therapies. So when you think about somebody who’s taking a cancer therapeutic, they’re going to suffer from side effects related to that therapeutic. Those side effects are related to the treatment not only not engaging in the tumour, but engaging in healthy tissues and delivering cell killing and inflammation outside of the tumour. We’re trying to get therapies uniquely into the tumour, not elsewhere.
We have three-dimensional models of proteins [and of] protein-based therapeutics, and we take an engineering approach to modify them in such a way that they are dependent on a unique chemistry that’s present in tumours—which are hyper proliferative and metabolically extremely selfish, [and] they create this wasteland around them. That unique chemistry enables binding of our therapies in that context, but not in the normal context of a healthy tissue.
What sort of impact could this potentially have on patients?
There’s two major applications of our platform technology. The first one is to address toxicities of existing therapies. If you think about a cancer patient, they’re taking their treatment, and the tumour is disappearing. They’re responding well, but their oncologist tells them, ‘You can’t continue, this is making you too sick. Your heart tissues, your lung, your gut, whatever, are not responding well. We unfortunately have to take you off this first-line therapy that could save your life, and we’re going to give you something else that maybe doesn’t have as good a chance of saving your life.’
That’s true for about a third of patients in the frontline immunotherapy space. [Being able to] stay on the right therapy for longer is going to save lives, and it’s going to increase quality of life, because people suffer so significantly from these therapies, they’d rather roll the dice, in some cases, with their own survival than go through the side effects.
The second application is to develop therapies in spaces in the clinical space that it’s not possible to address. If you imagine a therapy that was being developed and failed [before ever reaching the market] because of toxicity—despite being efficacious, despite knowing clinically in patients that this is an efficacious treatment—wouldn’t you want to develop that?
A lot of these pharma companies have spent tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars bringing a therapy forward, and had to abandon it because they’re binding to the right target, but they’re binding to the target in the wrong place. So if we can get it only to tumours not elsewhere, we can save or resurrect these therapies that would be very promising, and that means we can go after disease indications where there isn’t currently a good treatment.
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Tell us about 9Bio’s progress to date.
9Bio has been around since June of 2023, so we’re just a little bit more than two years old. In that time, we’ve developed our platform that allows us to engineer this specificity. It’s a computational platform with multiple elements to it. We’ve shown proof of concept that what we can do in a computer translates to a lab, and now we’re testing in mice.
We’ve built really great collaborations with the [National Research Council Canada] … and [Québec research and development non-profit] TransBIOTech, and we have a significant amount of non-dilutive funding to support that. Most recently, we got the support of Merck Digital Science Studios, which is a great opportunity for us to co-develop our products with a leader in the oncology space.
How does 9Bio’s model differ from other biotech companies?
If you’re developing a therapeutic in the oncology space, you’re often starting with either a ‘me too’ play—a minor variation—or you’re developing something from scratch. And 9Bio doesn’t really do either of those things.
We take clinically validated products, because we know they’re efficacious, and we develop them by dealing with the toxicity issues that [otherwise prevent their further] development. So in a way, we have a medium-risk approach, because we know these are efficacious—there’s no biological risk associated with their efficacy—and the risk associated with their toxicity can be solved very early in development, before we’re even in mice.
We frontload the risk knowing the efficacy is going to be more likely in the clinic. We’re less risky and potentially much faster than others.
What does your long-term, big-picture vision for 9Bio look like?
If we can help patients, that’s ultimately the goal. [Humans are] biology. We’re held together with duct tape and hope, and I want to make sure that that duct tape holds on for a little bit longer … and we’re not suffering along the way.
A lot of [cancer patients] are in a lot of pain when they don’t have to be. Alleviating that pain, [improving] quality of life, allowing them to make decisions that don’t require them to choose between surviving and going and spending time with their family, I think that’s a great opportunity. We want to be part of that. We want to lead the way in that.
BetaKit is the official media partner of Toronto Tech Week. Feature image courtesy Creative Destruction Lab.