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Boston-based diagnostic service startup Immuneering Corp. is looking to help cancer patients get the most from their own immune systems.
The startup has a proprietary modeling application that can take data gathered from a patient’s blood and tumor samples. Based on its own embedded logic, the application can determine if certain drugs are likely to activate that patient’s immune system and help recovery, said founder and CEO Benjamin Zeskind. He envisions using the system to provide services for pharmaceutical companies that want to predict which patients will respond to drugs that are under development, or to help health care providers optimize how they treat cancer patients.
Angels have funded the startup with an undisclosed sum so far, but now Zeskind wants $2 million in a Series A round of funding from venture capitalists, pharmaceutical companies or even contract research firms. Zeskind, an MIT graduate with a background in electrical and biological engineering and an MBA from Harvard Business School, designed the program himself by relying on modeling techniques developed by Doug Lauffenburger, the founder and director of MIT’s department of biological engineering and a scientific adviser to the company.
“There are a lot of instruments for making very precise specific measures of different characteristics of the immune system,” noted Zeskind. The difference with Immuneering is that it doesn’t just “look at the trees,” in terms of studying a patient’s specific immune characteristics. It analyzes all available measurements and sees “the whole forest,” creating a comprehensive understanding of a patient’s entire immune system, taking into account hundreds of different characteristics of immune cells.
The firm plans in the next year to deploy the system in a test done with California-based health care provider Kaiser Permanente and the National Institutes of Health. The test will determine the effectiveness of one drug for kidney cancer and melanoma. Thereafter, Zeskind hopes to start additional trials the following year.
“Immuneering has developed an innovative way to understand the interaction between a patient’s tumor and immune system,” said Francesco Marincola, chief of the infectious disease and immunogenetics section at the NIH, in an e-mail. “Ultimately, Immuneering’s technology could make it easier to develop therapies that trigger an immune response to eliminate a patient’s cancer.”
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