The time of mR­NA is in full swing as Mod­er­na and Pfiz­er/BioN­Tech have blown the doors off the field. But in drug de­vel­op­ers’ eyes, cur­rent-gen mR­NA vac­cines are just an ap­pe­tiz­er to the full course of ther­a­peu­tics fur­ther down the menu — at least that’s what two for­mer MIT re­searchers with syn­thet­ic bi­ol­o­gy roots are gam­bling on.

Strand Ther­a­peu­tics emerged from stealth Wednes­day with a $52 mil­lion Se­ries A to ad­vance its pipeline of pro­gram­ma­ble, self am­pli­fy­ing mR­NA ther­a­pies ini­tial­ly tar­get­ed at sol­id tu­mor im­muno-on­col­o­gy, the biotech said.

The team’s re­search stems from the work of CEO Jake Be­craft and head of R&D Tasuku Ki­ta­da at MIT’s Syn­thet­ic Bi­ol­o­gy Cen­ter and the Weiss Lab, where the pair met and fo­cused on ap­ply­ing syn­bio prin­ci­ples to mR­NA ther­a­peu­tic de­vel­op­ment. Along the way, their work formed Strand’s plat­form, which turns out long act­ing mR­NA ther­a­pies with greater speci­fici­ty and a wider ther­a­peu­tic in­dex than the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of mR­NA vac­cines.

The biotech is us­ing self am­pli­fy­ing tech, which in­duces a sin­gle copy of the mR­NA drug to repli­cate it­self in vi­vo. That of­fers a much longer ther­a­peu­tic win­dow than cell ther­a­pies like the Covid-19 vac­cines from Mod­er­na and BioN­Tech, Be­craft told End­points News, which work on the scale of days rather than weeks.

But per­haps the biggest dif­fer­ence from its range of com­peti­tors is Strand’s use of “ge­net­i­cal­ly pro­gram­ma­ble log­ic cir­cuits,” which al­low its mR­NA drugs to en­ter a spe­cif­ic cel­lu­lar en­vi­ron­ment and turn pro­tein ex­pres­sion on or off de­pend­ing on a se­ries of bio­mark­ers. It’s a for­mu­la fa­mil­iar in syn­thet­ic bi­ol­o­gy: Use “sen­sors” to iden­ti­fy the tar­get en­vi­ron­ment, “log­ic process” or com­pute those sig­nals, and then ef­fect a tar­get out­put.

The com­pa­ny’s syn­bio plat­form serves a dual pur­pose of al­low­ing tight con­trol over RNA self-repli­ca­tion, en­sur­ing the ther­a­py is on­ly around in the cell as long as it needs to be.

“One of the ma­jor prob­lems with self repli­ca­tion mR­NA is that you ac­tu­al­ly need to con­trol their repli­ca­tion at a much tighter lev­el — and that’s ac­tu­al­ly what syn­thet­ic bi­ol­o­gy is re­al­ly per­fect for,” Be­craft said. “You go in­to the se­quence of the repli­ca­tion ma­chin­ery and you can make mod­i­fi­ca­tions to how it repli­cates and ac­tu­al­ly con­trol it.”

All that, ul­ti­mate­ly, means one drug could the­o­ret­i­cal­ly have an ef­fect on a range of dis­ease types — par­tic­u­lar­ly in a het­ero­ge­neous ther­a­peu­tic area such as can­cer. No sur­prise, then, that can­cer is ex­act­ly where Strand is aim­ing first.

The biotech is hop­ing to take its lead drug, which is fo­cused in the sol­id tu­mor I/O space in­to the clin­ic by 2022. The com­pound is the tar­get of a li­cens­ing pact with Chi­nese drug­mak­er BeiGene, which has pledged to cov­er some de­vel­op­ment and com­mer­cial­iza­tion costs in the re­gion. Can­cer is no easy area to jump head­first in­to, but it is a prof­itable one. Be­craft high­light­ed the field’s well-es­tab­lished bi­ol­o­gy as ripe with big tar­gets for Strand’s drugs.

“I think can­cer is a great first tar­get for things like the next gen­er­a­tion of RNA ther­a­peu­tics be­cause can­cer has a lot of known tar­gets and known bi­ol­o­gy for ther­a­peu­tic in­ter­ven­tion,” Be­craft said. “It just gives you a great start­ing point to de­vel­op a new plat­form. Can­cer kills peo­ple; we got­ta do some­thing.”

Be­craft said his com­pa­ny would look to sign sim­i­lar deals in the com­ing months, aim­ing to sign on “high­ly strate­gic” part­ners to ad­vance Strand’s pipeline and com­mer­cial op­por­tu­ni­ties.

It’s the first go-round as CEO for Be­craft, who made the jump straight from MIT as he worked to build Strand in stealth mode along­side Ki­ta­da start­ing in 2018. He said his first pri­or­i­ties are dri­ving the com­pa­ny’s lead pro­gram ahead while build­ing the pipeline and adding a strong team around him. The com­pa­ny is cur­rent­ly on a hir­ing spree with 25 on board and hopes to hit as many as 80 em­ploy­ees as it nears the clin­ic, Be­craft said.

The Se­ries A round was joined by a syn­di­cate of in­vestors in Red­mile Group, BeiGene and Cam­ford Cap­i­tal, as well as ex­ist­ing in­vestors Play­ground Glob­al and AN­RI.

As Zentalis geared up for an AACR presentation of early data on its WEE1 inhibitor earlier this year, its Chinese joint venture Zentera wasn’t idle, either.

Zentera, which has headquarters in Shanghai, had already nabbed clearance to start clinical trials in China for three of the parent company’s drugs. In May — just a month after Zentalis touted three “exceptional responses” out of 55 patients for their shared lead drug, ZN-c3 — it got a fourth CTA approval.

Amid an industrywide review of cancer drugs with accelerated approval, Bristol Myers Squibb had to make the tough call last month to yank an approval for leading I/O drug Opdivo after flopping a confirmatory study. Now, a second Bristol Myers drug is on the chopping block.

Bristol Myers has pulled aging HDAC inhibitor Istodax’s indication in peripheral T cell lymphoma after a Phase III confirmatory study for the drug flopped on its progression-free survival endpoint, the drugmaker said Monday.