Mission Bio
Hannah Viernes, Mission Bio
viernes@missionbio.com
Only 3% of cancer drugs tested in clinical trials between 2000 and 2015 have been approved to treat patients, and even those that have been are not as effective as hoped. Founded in 2012, Mission Bio set out to unlock the ground truth of cancer through response, relapse, and remission. The company built its proprietary technology, Tapestri Platform, which was the industry’s first-ever device to sequence DNA at the single-cell level. Now it’s also the first and only platform capable of analyzing genotype and phenotype changes simultaneously in single cells.
Unlike bulk sequencing technologies that take the average genetic view of a tumor, Tapestri has 10,000 times the resolution, giving researchers and clinicians insight into each and every cell. With this level of insight, researchers can have a precise understanding of how mutations in the DNA are connected to the cell’s protein expression patterns and how the interplay between the two drives therapy resistance and relapse.
In 2020, Mission Bio doubled down on its mission despite the setbacks of COVID-19. Over the past few months, the company collaborated with top pharma companies such as Agios and leading cancer centers including Stanford and MD Anderson to support their work in therapeutic resistance and treatment response monitoring. As a result, Mission Bio helped drive five clinical studies demonstrating the efficacy of Tapestri in identifying resistance mechanisms and measuring potential relapse in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients.
In August, the company raised $70 million in its Series C round to support its rapid growth as the company works to bring Tapestri into more clinical trials for novel cancer treatments, including those for cell and gene therapy development.
