Our Mission

A New Approach

In our thirty-year journey to find a cure for metasteses of the lung and liver, we discovered that among the shared features of these metastatic lesions are the properties associated with mass transport, i.e. cells, biomolecules, metabolites, nutrients, oxygen, and exogenous therapeutic agents, “travel” differently through cancer than they do through normal tissues.

Further, the very presence of cancer causes mass transport modifications to occur within the whole body, and not only the cancer sites. These modifications take place largely in what are known as “biological barriers” of the body, including during the course of cancer initiation and throughout its evolution.

Cancer-modified biological barriers confer a degree of protection to cancer cells against the therapies used today, leading to the emergence of “therapeutic resistance:” the drugs that initially work for a metastatic patient eventually start failing after some cycles of treatment, while they also accumulate a level of collateral damage that is disproportionate to the therapeutic benefits, in a spiral that invariably leads to a tragic end. This despairing spiral inspired our focus on understanding the causes of therapeutic resistance.

Our work has shown that the carcinogenesis-induced evolution of cancer-protecting biological barriers plays a dominant role in resistance. Our next step was to try to develop new therapeutic agents that could bypass the cancer-modified biological barriers so that effective treatment could be delivered to cancer cells, and open the way toward the hope for a definitive cure of lung and liver malignancies.

Currently, metastases to the lung and liver remain incurable — but, we believe, not for long.

We believe we finally have the tools to bring about decisive breakthroughs against these deadliest of cancers. We have developed “Transport Oncophysics,” the mathematical and biophysical framework for understanding cancer, and how to attack it, even in the case of lung and liver lesions, and even past its evolution into otherwise therapy-resistant forms.

Guided by Transport Oncophysics, we invented approaches to develop unprecedented new families of cancer drugs, which are able to defeat the cancer-protecting biological barriers of the body. Our first drug, ML-016, has proven to yield long-term, effective functional cures to devastating presentations of metastases to the lung and liver in 40-50% of treated animals in preclinical models. Even those that suffered relapse had much longer survivals than that achieved with conventional cancer treatments.