Overcoming Immunotherapy’s Biggest Challenges

Immunotherapy has revolutionized the treatment of certain blood cancers. However, increasing its impact requires expanding access to solid tumors, which represent approximately 90% of cancers worldwide. The impact of immunotherapies in solid tumors has been limited for two key reasons:

Lack of tumor-specific targets, leading to harmful effects on healthy cells
Presence of an inhibitory tumor microenvironment that impairs immune response

Our first-in-class Flare platform is designed to overcome these two core challenges. It first dispatches a viral vector equipped with a novel universal antigen — called Flare — that tags solid tumor cells with exquisite specificity while simultaneously activating the immune system and eroding the inhibitory tumor microenvironment. The Flare antigen then acts as a beacon, guiding the way for the immune system to find and clear the marked cancer cells while avoiding healthy tissue.

See how it works

Sending up a Flare

Instead of relying on naturally occurring targets expressed by cancer cells, we created Flare, an optimized antigen. We send a cancer cell-specific viral vector to selectively locate epithelial-derived tumors throughout the body, tagging them with Flare. The viral vector also makes the tumor microenvironment more accessible to the immune system.