24 Feb New cancer imaging startup harnesses Wisconsin expertise
An adult elephant has the body mass of about 100 human beings. Despite their enormous size, these remarkable creatures defy the odds by almost never getting cancer.
This paradox is still a mystery to scientists. It’s also a source of inspiration for a promising new Wisconsin spinoff company, Elephas Biosciences, which has created a platform to predict whether patients will respond successfully to cancer immunotherapy.
Elephas was born in 2020 with major influences from bioimaging advances at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research. Morgridge Investigator Kevin Eliceiri, a UW–Madison professor of medical physics and biomedical engineering, has been working closely with Elephas leaders to help bring this promising new technology to fruition.
Immunotherapy treatments — essentially powering the body’s own immune system to fight cancer — are the newest wave of cancer treatment and are generating great hope. More than 70 immunotherapy drugs are now in the clinical pipeline with more than 1,000 clinical trials nationally.
The National Cancer Institute estimates that about 20 percent of all immunotherapy treatments result in fully treating cancer. That means many people can go through months of treatment before they know whether it will work. The uncertainty also means that some patients who might be ideal candidates for immunotherapy do not get recruited.
Elephas is working to change that dynamic by testing drugs within “tumors in a dish” from a patients’ own biopsy and predicting which candidates will have the best odds of success. A key aspect of this testing is using label free, non-invasive imaging modalities that can help determine cell state and viability without adverse effects on downstream drug testing.
“The problem is we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these great therapies, but there are no tools to guide decisions on who will benefit most,” says Maneesh Arora, founder and CEO of Elephas. “And with all these immunotherapies coming to market, that is the big opportunity for Elephas.”