Presage Biosciences, Inc.

“What if you could test the efficacy of multiple new cancer drugs in a patient without harmful side effects?” We asked this question when we started Presage to address a fundamental issue that hampers development of new cancer drugs. The issue as we see it is that new drugs are tested in laboratory models of cancer that simply do not accurately represent the complexity of the human tumor microenvironment and therefore do not reliably predict patient benefit in the clinic. As a result, drugs that exhibit outstanding performance in preclinical models of cancer more often than not, fail to provide benefit to patients when these same agents are tested in clinical trials. It's hard to deny this issue. The composite success rate for cancer drug candidates entering trials is a dismal 8%. This overwhelming percentage of clinical failures comes at tremendous cost to drug developers ($100s of millions to billions), and most importantly to patients in need of new therapy options. We can do better. Presage is addressing this issue with CIVO technology. CIVO enables, for the first time, simultaneous evaluation and comparison of multiple anti-cancer drugs, drug candidates, and drug combinations directly in a patient’s tumor, without toxicities associated with typical clinical drug exposures. This is done via a new way to approach Phase 0 clinical trials. Presage has established feasibility of CIVO in the clinic, a dedicated engineering and clinical operations team, a clear regulatory path, and a network of CIVO-trained clinical sites to execute on Phase 0 collaborations with biopharma partners. Presage has also established Phase 0 collaborations with marquee cancer drug development companies including Takeda, Celgene and Bristol-Myers Squibb. Our ultimate goal is to improve early drug evaluation and substantially increase the success rate of new drugs for cancer patients.