Why Are Cancer Cells Able to Thrive in Conditions That Other Cells Cannot?

Soley Therapeutics’ co-founder and CEO Yerem Yeghiazarians, MD, spoke with Pharmaceutical Executive about the unique approach his company took to developing its core technology. According to him, the concept began with a focus on how different cells react to stress as opposed to targeting a specific virus or endpoint.

Pharmaceutical Executive: Why are cancer cells able to thrive in conditions that other cells cannot?
Yerem Yeghiazarians: Let me tell you a little bit about how Soley Therapeutics started and what we focused on. We're a science driven, tech enabled drug discovery company that started over 15 years ago. My co-founder and I came from two different backgrounds. I came as a clinician scientist and a cardiovascular stem cell background. I was the founder and director of the Stem Cell Institute, translational stem cell program at UC UCSF.

My co-founder is a molecular and cancer biologist. We focused on how to rescue dying heart muscle cells from a harsh environment of low oxygen and low nutrients, which is the environment of a heart attack. It turns out that is the exact same environment of a tumor. That's the micro-environment where cancer cells have adapted to. Cancer does not die in that environment, it actually thrives, grows, proliferates and unfortunately, metastasizes and kills the patient.

Some cells, such as heart muscle and neuronal cells, take just minutes to die in the harsh environment of a heart attack or stroke, whereas other cells have adapted to that environment. We wanted to figure out a scientific question: how do cells determine their fate? Why is it that some cells survive a harsh environment, whereas other cells, within minutes, die?

That was the background of how we started working together. Even though the company is only five years old, we've been working on this for over 15 to 16 years together to create a platform where we would better understand what is the flow of information that goes to the cell that determines cellular fate. Why is it that some cells are able to adapt to an environment whereas others are not?

The way we do this is that all cells have the capacity to sense their environment, and different cells sense their environment differently. Cancer cells sense the tumor microenvironment very differently than heart muscle or neuronal cells, and they transmit specific information through the cell that dictates if they're going to survive or die within that same environment.

When a cell is used as a strong sensor, it can sense anything in its environment, not just the oxygen and nutrient level, but also drugs in the environment. The platform that we've created takes advantage of the cell as the most powerful sensor to sense different drugs in the environment, and we've able to decode that cellular information.

We can selectively screen drugs to increase the stress level in a cell and kill it if the indication is cancer or antimicrobials. Or we can revert that process to make the cell work better, live longer, and function properly. This is what the platform does. It took us over 10 years of work in academia at UCSF to create this image based, first in class platform.