(Ten63’s founders, Dr. Marcel Frenkel, Dr. Bruce Donald and Dr. Mark Hallen with members of their Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) and team.
From top to bottom, Ten63’s head of chemistry, Dr. Stephen Thomson, SAB member Jane Richardson, SAB member Dr. Weitao Yang, Ten63’s senior advisor Nancy Miller-Rich, Ten63’s computational scientist Chun Chan, SAB member Dr. Bruce Tidor, SAB member Dr. Cynthia Rudin, Ten63’s co-founder and CTO Dr. Mark Hallen, Ten63 co-founder and chair of SAB Dr. Bruce Donald, and Ten63 co-founder and CEO Dr. Marcel Frenkel)
Recent statistics reveal that over 600,000 Americans will die of cancer in 2022, with the worldwide numbers surpassing ten million people. Healthcare and research institutions have dedicated a great deal of time to find how to cure cancer, but the progress has unfortunately been too slow for many patients. Pharmaceutical company TEN63 Therapeutics has taken up the baton and joined the race to stop cancer.
Co-founded by Marcel Frenkel, Ph.D., who calls cancer the “myopic killer,” TEN63 Therapeutics is his way of creating an opportunity out of personal loss. Frenkel, a biochemist from Duke University, lost his mother to cancer and dealt with the trauma of watching her fight for her life till she passed away. He built TEN63 to address the problem from its root by giving more context to the development of the disease and how it can be stopped. “When people join TEN63, I always tell them, “Make no mistake, our enemy dresses in black and carries a scythe, but it is not death itself. It is a myopic interloper, and that is why this is going to work. Cancer leverages an incredible power: evolution itself. The same force that created all the biodiversity in the history of this planet powers this horrible disease,” Frenkel explained. “Cancer is simply an evolutionary mistake, a mutiny of one of the trillions of cells that make the human body. It quickly becomes many, and as the cancer continues to spread, it continues to evolve, mutate, and change. Eventually, there are tens of millions of different cancer cells, and unfortunately, each one of them is slightly different. A wave of errors in the human genetic code, fighting each other and the human body’s immune system for the chance to replicate and perpetuate.”
Frenkel partnered with Dr. Mark Hallen, a gifted computer scientist and computational chemist who pioneered the use of AI to improve the physics of large scale protein designs, and Dr. Bruce Donald, the James B. Duke distinguished professor of Computer Science, and Professor of Mathematics, Chemistry and Biochemistry at Duke University, to launch TEN63. Ten63 started exploring and learning more about the disease, with a focus on how to defeat it. “We want to beat cancer. To understand how we can develop therapeutics that provide durable and significant benefit to patients, ultimately we wanted to find a cure to this horrible disease, and that’s the essence of TEN63’s existence,” Frenkel said.
Since TEN63 was launched, it has focused on cancer’s one weakness. “Evolution is myopic,” Frenkel says. “Although cancer’s ability to evolve makes it very difficult to defeat because it can repeatedly develop resistant to nearly any therapeutic we throw at it, evolution is reactive and tends to overreact by selecting for individual cancer cells that are the most adept to the current situations, allowing cancer to potentially be trapped by a sufficiently smart adversary.” TEN63 Therapeutics has put forward a theory that explores killing cancer by hitting it in ways that drive cancer to become susceptible to the body’s own immune system.
Explaining the approach TEN63 plans to implement, Frenkel said, “Immuno Oncology has revolutionized cancer care, and for about 20% of patients it is indeed curative. Unfortunately, cancer fights to keep the immune system at bay and for the other 80% of patients there has not yet been a way through. So, what is the plan? Imagine what would happen if we could attack cancer in places that would force it to adapt to the current situation, force it to narrow its population, weaken it until it loses its ability to maintain its hold against the immune system and then let the body do the rest?”
Central to this approach is TEN63’s unique set of proprietary molecular design algorithms. Cancer is driven by a vast network of proteins that signal to each other to drive uncontrolled cell growth and resist the body’s defenses. Drugs that target particular proteins can disrupt this network, allowing successful treatment. But many cancers grow resistant to all current drugs because of the limited number of proteins that are tractable to today’s drug discovery techniques. “Cancer hides behind undruggable targets. We are bringing together the strengths of AI, quantum chemistry, and medicinal chemistry to make them druggable,” Frenkel explains.
To achieve its mission TEN63 Therapeutics is building the next generation of computational drug discovery methods, a platform they call BEYOND. The company has revealed its plan to create first and best-in-class therapeutics that will impose a selective pressure that ultimately will help the immune system overcome cancer’s numerous barriers.
The team at TEN63 Therapeutic has all the motivation in the world to end cancer. Frenkel and his Co-Founders, have built a team to execute their vision of changing the prognosis of cancer patients worldwide.
