Precision therapy, where medicines become ever more specific to certain mutations in certain tumors, is often touted as the future of oncology. But a new company called Dispatch Bio is taking the opposite approach and attempting to go as wide as possible. Instead of tailoring the right therapy to the right patient, Dispatch is developing a new, universal approach to attempt to treat any cancer applying immunotherapy.
The key to this approach is a synthetic protein, called the “flare” antigen, which Dispatch’s therapy aims to install on every cancer cell in a patient’s body. Once there, the company can direct immunotherapies to attack that protein and kill the cancer carrying it, wherever it is in the body and whatever cancer type it may be.
“Too many strategies that have come before seem to solve a single problem or a single disease,” Lex Johnson, the Dispatch’s chief platform officer, declared in a video on the company’s website. “The universality of Dispatch’s approach is really derived from the engineering we did around this unique flare protein.”
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