Abdabra mark: a hollow polyhedral shell assembled from many coloured antibodies

Abdabra

Stop metastasis early

Background

Sometimes, metastasis is invisible. Prostate cancer is localized if it cannot be seen (outside the prostate) by the most sensitive imaging technology, PET-CT/PSMA, which can see a 2.3 mm tumor (3 million cells) about 50% of the time.

Metastasis is happening even if it is invisible!

Prostate cancer risk is assessed based on biopsy and MRI.

The number of high risk localized prostate cancer diagnoses per year is about

320,000(worldwide) 65,000(US)

Our mission

Develop an antibody drug to treat high risk localized prostate cancer by killing isolated prostate cancer cells.

This makes sense because isolated cancer cells are relatively unprotected, unlike tumors. However we do have to kill small clusters, which migrate in our bodies along with single cancer cells.

A cocktail glass holding several differently coloured antibodies

Our antibody is actually a cocktail: more than one antibody, because the starting prostate cancer, usually adenocarcinoma, often changes over time into other more dangerous types, including neuroendocrine prostate cancer. We should target such at the start to hinder their proliferation. One protein target is unlikely to suffice to target all species.

No other company is in this space (to our knowledge).

Cell killing is a thing

Existing drugs do it for other cells for other diseases. Obinutuzumab kills B cells, for chronic lymphocytic leukemia (annual sales $1.2B). Benralizumab kills eosinophils and basophils, for eosinophilic asthma (annual sales $2.0B). These drugs have very similar design to our drug.

Treatment course

prostatectomy or radiation therapy plus (perhaps) androgen deprivation and pathway drugs you’re diagnosed here standard of care metastasis is now visible for some patients many antibody therapeutics are available, but prognosis is poor standard of care plus our new drug*
*We’re guessing optimistically – short of a clinical trial, we can’t know

For the experts

Our antibodies are Fc enhanced for effector function and half life, do not carry payloads, and are not T cell engagers. They are intended for long term use. The antibody targets we choose will all be highly specific.

Abdabra

We are a very early stage (pre-seed) company. Currently we are talking to the prostate cancer community. If you’re curious, we’d love to hear from you — write to us: info@abdabra.com.

A word about our founding team

A bobcat in long grass, looking into the camera A black cat stretched out on a sunlit carpet A male carpenter bee, Xylocopa sonorina, on purple sage flowers

David Jaffe is a mathematician turned computational biologist turned antibody developer. Most recently he was a cofounder of Infinimmune, which develops antibody drugs targeted at inflammatory disease. Before that he was Computational Biology Fellow at 10x Genomics; his last project there was to redesign their 10x VDJ platform to do clonotyping correctly; he also built a tool enclone for looking at VDJ data. Before that he was Director of Computational Research and Development in the Genome Sequencing and Analysis Program at the Broad Institute. The work of his group included the development of ARACHNE, ALLPATHS and DISCOVAR. Before that he was Professor of Mathematics at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, where he worked on algebraic geometry and then error correcting codes. He received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of California – Berkeley. Here are his publications. He entertains himself by running trails with a camera.

photos courtesy DJ

We are still recruiting founders.