Arch joins Cel­gene, Chi­na in­vestors bankrolling a pi­o­neer­ing New York biotech start­up fo­cused on a new ap­proach to metas­ta­sis

Julio Aguirre-Ghiso has steered the work in his lab at Mount Sinai down some of the less-trav­eled path­ways of can­cer re­search. And it’s led him to launch a biotech — which is hav­ing its com­ing-out par­ty to­day in New York — that has now set out to de­vel­op new med­i­cines tai­lored for the field he’s been pi­o­neer­ing.

While a mas­sive amount of can­cer re­search has been de­vot­ed to a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of tu­mors and new and bet­ter ways to kill tu­mor cells, Aguirre-Ghiso’s re­search has cen­tered on “dor­mant” dis­sem­i­nat­ed tu­mor cells, or DTCs, that can re­ac­ti­vate long af­ter drugs have wiped out all ap­pear­ances of can­cer — fu­el­ing a metasta­t­ic re­sponse that comes back to kill the pa­tient with near cer­tain­ty.

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