About Adze Biotechnology
Adze Biotechnology is a pre-clinical stage company developing a portfolio of
systemically deliverable oncolytic immunotherapies for the treatment of cancers with significant unmet needs.
Adze Solves Key Problems in Cancer Immunotherapy
Our goal is to help patients overcome cancer immune evasion and enable and drive their immune systems to develop durable anti-tumor immunities.
Our immunotherapies are based on a proprietary oncolytic platform developed at the Mayo Clinic that allows for systemic, targeted delivery and localized amplification of therapeutic payloads in tumors.
Adze immunotherapies kill tumors directly through cell lysis and can carry clinically validated immune-stimulatory and checkpoint inhibitor proteins to reprogram the tumor microenvironment.
Checkpoint inhibitors (CPIs) comprise a $28+ billion market. However, there are four major shortcomings with CPIs:
- CPIs don’t kill cancer cells directly. CPIs merely “release the brakes” on a patient’s CD8+ T cells, which then kill cancer cells.
- T cells often cannot specifically recognize cancer cells to kill them.
- T cell function often becomes impaired due to factors in the tumor microenvironment.
- T cells often can’t infiltrate many types of tumors. These are referred to as ‘cold’ tumors.
Adze oncolytic immunotherapies solves these problems by:
Killing cancer cells directly, while releasing tumor neoantigens.
Allowing T cells to recognize cancer cells via the released neoantigens.
Delivering immune stimulatory payloads to stimulate T cell function.
Generating markers of immunogenic cell death which increases T cells infiltration in tumors (turning ‘cold’ tumors ‘hot’).
Leadership Team
Sidney Hopps
CEO
Sidney Hopps has 18 years of experience in international financial markets in equity and equity derivatives securitization and sales in New York, Chicago, London, and Paris.
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Mr Hopps spent many years working with biotechnology companies in the public markets while at UBS and First Albany Corp. Prior to co-founding Adze Biotechnology, Mr Hopps was a partner in Global Diversified Fund Management, a hedge fund based in Connecticut. Then Mr. Hopps spent seven years as the CEO of Jivana Biotechnology. Mr Hopps is a member of 700 for Science, a collaborative community dedicated to bringing early stage biotechnologies to life.
Dr Michael Barry
CSO
The laboratory of Michael A. Barry, Ph.D., is working to use genes and viruses to treat a set of very difficult diseases.
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Because these agents are as adaptable as DNA itself, Dr. Barry and his team can apply these "drugs" against a variety of diseases by fine-tuning which cells they target and avoiding or activating the immune system. This work falls into three areas: gene therapy, gene-based vaccines and anti-cancer virotherapy. For gene therapy and vaccines, Dr. Barry and his colleagues want to deliver genes to cells and have the cells survive. For this reason, they use tamed versions of viruses to deliver genes for gene therapy or gene-based vaccines. For cancer therapy, the goal is to kill cells. For this application, they modify the viruses to still kill cancer cells, but protect normal cells. These anti-cancer viruses have the appeal that they can be thought of as "self-amplifying" drugs because each cancer cell that gets killed can in turn produce thousands of new anti-cancer viruses that can spread to other cancer sites. Therefore, these self-amplifying drugs can infect one cancer site and spread. Dr. Barry's lab therefore hopes they may be useful to treat cancers that have spread or have metastasized locally or throughout the body. In recent years, the lab has tested a number of viruses against many types of cancer, including prostate, breast, ovarian and B cell cancers. Interestingly, they have found that different viruses actually appear to have different "appetites" for killing different types of cancers. Based on this, the lab is moving several viruses toward the clinic, with viruses for prostate cancer and B cell lymphoma being closest to clinical translation.
Kenneth Templin
CFO
Ken Templin is a retired Business Resource Manager from Caterpillar where he spent almost 37 years working in both the engine and machinery businesses in multiple locations throughout the world.
Patrick Sage
Director
Mr. Sage, a registered patent attorney since 1993 and founder of Kalamazoo, Mich.-based Hueschen & Sage, PLLC, specializes in advising innovator pharmaceutical, dermatological and fine chemical companies in portfolio development, prosecution, management, agency registration, enforcement and partnering.
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Mr. Sage graduated from Kalamazoo College with a BA in Biology in 1986, and from Loyola University in Chicago with a JD in 1992. He started his career as a biochemist with The Upjohn Company, conducting pharmacological research on putative Alzheimer’s compounds.
Michael Williams
Advisor
Michael is an experienced international executive, business leader and entrepreneur with 30+ years of experience in healthcare and technology.
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Michael has held leadership positions in leading healthcare companies around the world, including BMS, Pfizer and Takeda, as well as C-Suite roles with biotech and digital health startups.
Michael's roles have included: Chief Business Officer at Abreos Biosciences, Chief Operating Officer at Intarcia Therapeutics, Head of Global Marketing at Takeda Pharmaceuticals in Zurich and Chicago, Vice President, Global Commercial Development, Primary Care Business Unit at Pfizer, and VP European Marketing & Operations at Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Dr Richard Vile
Advisor
My primary research interests are centered on the development of gene-, viro-, adoptive T cell and immuno-therapies for cancer.
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We use murine and human models to test strategies by which oncolytic viruses can be delivered systemically to metastatic disease and how oncolytic viroimmunotherapy can be combined with adoptive T cell therapy to improve the efficacy of either alone. In addition, we have a long term interest in defining how the immune system can be re-educated to recognize and react against tumor associated antigens. Our pre-clinical studies are focused on translational relevance and we are focused on developing improved immunotherapies for malignant melanoma and pediatric brain tumors. I am currently the PI or co-Pi on three different clinical trials in collaboration with our clinical partners in London and Leeds in the UK, and i am carrying out, or have completed, 5 clinical trials of oncolytic viroimmunotherapy at Mayo Clinic.
We turn cold tumors hot and make tumors visible to the patient’s immune system.
Adze Biotechnology is developing a growing platform of immunotherapies that utilize our proprietary and targeted oncolytic viral backbone. Our oncolytic backbone enables systemic delivery of immunotherapies and checkpoint inhibitors that self-amplify (conditionally replicate) locally in tumors.