Attacking Cancer With Code And Winning - EP 48 Jake Becraft

**Jake Becraft** (0:00)
We're going to treat them one more time. If they come in, in three more weeks, and they look even worse than this, we're going to recommend they go to hospice, we'll make them as comfortable as we can. They came in that, so now six weeks after, after two doses of our drug, they came in at that additional three weeks, and 40% of the tumors had melted off, it looked like. I mean, there was just, they were just dying off. You could sort of see them. It didn't look particularly pleasant, but the patient was describing to the doctor that they felt like they had more energy, that they felt better, and then over the period of about four or five months, their disease just disappeared.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:40)
Off of the two doses?

**Jake Becraft** (0:42)
Off of, we continued to give them doses every three weeks into their tumors. That patient now, 15 months since, 16 months since starting our trial, is still on the trial, has no more detectable disease, those are the sorts of things that I think as a scientist, it just makes you go like, holy shit.

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**Ashlee Vance** (1:52)
Jake Becraft, thank you so much for having us here. We're Strand Therapeutics, right in the heart of Boston.

**Jake Becraft** (1:59)
We're near Fenway, I think. Yeah, a block.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:02)
Yeah.

**Jake Becraft** (2:03)
You can go catch a game tonight.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:05)
I think it was the second time I've been here, and it was a cool building. We got a double helix in the background for people watching at home. I'll take a crack at the 30,000-foot explanation of Strand, and then you'll help me do better, and we'll dive in. Yeah, but I mean, I think it's fair to say you guys are trying to cure cancer.

**Jake Becraft** (2:32)
Yeah, as a place to start.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:35)
Yeah, and so during, I think, the pandemic, lots of people would have heard about mRNA and the vaccines, and you guys were working on technology related to that even before all that started. And then my read on things is are advancing mRNA in all these new ways. And I think that was part of the story is people heard so much about mRNA during COVID. And it was like, well, what's happened to that technology since and where can it be pushed? And I know lots of people are working on it, but you guys, like I said, yeah, you were on this ahead of time.

**Jake Becraft** (3:13)
Yeah, we have the advantage of time, right? So I moved to Boston to do my PhD starting in 2013 And at that time, there was this little quiet startup, actually upset my PhD lab that I joined, Ron Weiss's lab at MIT. It was off campus and six floors up, there was this startup that had just come out of stealth. They were called Moderna. And they had just raised like $100 million and they were doing mRNA technology. And we thought that is, mRNA is this incredibly promising tech. It essentially is a way to, a very fancy way to deliver proteins into a cell, right? So mRNA, you can make any protein sequence you want, any protein sequence you want. You encode that protein onto the messenger RNA. You put that messenger RNA into a cell, and the cell will essentially make that protein. And so for vaccines, it's very rapid, right? You can very rapidly take a virus sequence, put that into the vaccine, and have your cells making this viral protein, which then your immune system can be trained on. But all of medicine for the past 30 years has moved from these small molecule drugs into what we call biologics. It's these synthetic proteins that we make and we deliver to patients. We make those proteins in a lab. It's very, you know, it's not really scalable. It's not all sorts of different manufacturing processes you have to do. And at the end of the day, you take the proteins and you inject them into patients. Sometimes they work the way they're supposed to. But a lot of times, it's sort of an abstraction for how your body is used to processing the proteins. You have to get the protein actually into cells. You have to get the cells to actually make the protein to get the full biology of how it works. And that's what messenger RNA allows us to do. There was all sorts of different ways people have been trying for years. But mRNA, to me, represented the first ability to encode a protein onto one singular scalable modality, deliver that into a patient, and have that patient's body actually make that protein naturally.