Reinventing Dendritic Cell Therapy for Solid Tumors
(Updates coming May 2024)
Reinventing Dendritic Cell Therapy for Solid Tumors
(Updates coming May 2024)
Co-Founder
CEO
Ananya is passionate about using exciting science to bring life-changing therapies to market for patients.
Her experiences in the contract manufacturing and development side of the pharma/biotech industry in roles across Operations, Engineering, Business Development, and Project Management, have given her a holistic view of a
Co-Founder
CEO
Ananya is passionate about using exciting science to bring life-changing therapies to market for patients.
Her experiences in the contract manufacturing and development side of the pharma/biotech industry in roles across Operations, Engineering, Business Development, and Project Management, have given her a holistic view of a complex industry.
Ananya has earned a BSE in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University, a MS in Engineering Sciences and an MBA from Harvard. Prior to founding Guardian Bio, she was a Blavatnik Fellow at Harvard Business School.
Co-Founder
CSO
Driven by a love of science and the ocean, Ricky started his career as a marine biologist and research diver at Florida Atlantic University with a focus on marine natural products and drug discovery.
Increasingly interested in therapeutic applications, he pursued a PhD at University of Central Florida, focused on immunology
Co-Founder
CSO
Driven by a love of science and the ocean, Ricky started his career as a marine biologist and research diver at Florida Atlantic University with a focus on marine natural products and drug discovery.
Increasingly interested in therapeutic applications, he pursued a PhD at University of Central Florida, focused on immunology. During his postdoctoral fellowship in cancer immunology and tumor microenvironment at the University of Pennsylvania, he worked on academic/industry partnerships , published papers, and was awarded academic grants including the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (T32).
Ricky is a prolific science communicator and frequently appears on podcasts and creates educational science content for an audience of over a quarter million followers across various social media platforms.
Academic Co-Founder
Chair, Scientific Advisory Board
Dr. Palucka is a world-renowned clinical oncologist and cancer immunologist. Her group pioneered the development of dendritic cell-based therapy for cancer and HIV patients.
Dr. Palucka is Professor and Edison T. Liu Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at The Jackson Laboratory, and is the D
Academic Co-Founder
Chair, Scientific Advisory Board
Dr. Palucka is a world-renowned clinical oncologist and cancer immunologist. Her group pioneered the development of dendritic cell-based therapy for cancer and HIV patients.
Dr. Palucka is Professor and Edison T. Liu Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at The Jackson Laboratory, and is the Director of the JAX Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center. Her lab is focused in understanding how vaccines work and precisely defining the immune mechanisms that underpin successful vaccination.
Dr. Palucka previously served as the director of the Ralph M. Steinman Center for Cancer Vaccines and was the Michael A.E. Ramsay Chair for Cancer Immunology Research at the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research. She has authored 100+ papers on dendritic cells.
Former CSO, Kite Pharma
CEO Normunity
Former CSO, Genocea
Director, Center for Cancer Immunotherapy at Duke University
Former AACR President
Deputy Director for Basic & Translational Research, Knight Cancer Institute
UCSF Professor, Founder and Partner at Foundery LP
Dendritic cells (DCs) are rare immune cells frequently referred to as the "sentinels of the immune system". They patrol the body looking for signs of danger such as infected or cancerous cells. Once this danger is sensed, they take up pieces of these cells. These pieces are referred to as antigens. DCs then use these antigens to train killer immune cells like T cells. When presenting these antigens, DCs give additional signals that activate T cells and drive them to eliminate cell with these antigen targets present.
Recent breakthroughs in DC biology have uncovered that there are multiple subtypes of DCs. While all DCs can present antigen, they differ in how they process antigens and in how they can instruct other immune cells. One of the most important discoveries in this space was defining the rarest DC subtype, the conventional DC type 1 (cDC1s). These cells are the primary immune cell that initiates anti-tumor immune responses. Thanks to their unique toolkit, they can orchestrate and maintain productive anti-tumor immune responses and do so frequently throughout the life of a person.
There is extensive literature describing cDC1 deficiencies and dysfunction in cancer patients, even when other DC subtypes remain intact. Typically, the cancer cells themselves are the main drivers of this dysfunction. Cancer cells can release signals that block the differentiation of cDC1s from their precursors, dramatically depleting the numbers of cDC1s in patients. Further, already existing cDC1 populations can be rendered dysfunctional as these same signals can drive them to more tolerogenic states before they are fully activated or matured. These factors combined severely limit the ability of the body to eliminate the cancer and even a patients ability to respond to therapies that rely on native immunity.
Cancer immunity and therapy rely on antigen presentation from rare dendritic cells called cDC1s. These cells are some of the first immune cells disabled by cancer as it takes hold, creating a bottleneck for clinical responses.
Previous dendritic cell approaches were never able to fully reconstitute this cell population, limiting their clinical success.
Guardian Bio has developed a proprietary process to generate true cDC1s from a patient’s own stem cells. We call these Guard-cDC1s.
Guard-cDC1s are capable of restoring dysfunctional antigen presentation in late stage cancer patients. They can stimulate against multiple targets simultaneously, and activate various effector cells.
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