5:15 - Having a co-founder pass away
10:33 - Drug resistance and cancer patients
18:24 - Clinical development
23:17 - Raising a series A as a biotech
26:43 - Striking partnerships
Check out the LinkedIn event for our livestream with Aurelio Perucca on May 22nd.
Stefanie Flückiger-Mangual is the co-founder and CEO at TOLREMO Therapeutics, a biotech startup on a mission to prevent non-genetic cancer drug resistance. She holds a PhD in Molecular and Translational Biomedicine from ETH and worked there as a Postdoctoral Researcher before starting TOLREMO in 2017 together with Wilhelm Krek, who has since tragically passed away.
There is no shortage of cancer therapies in biotech and medtech, and one common problem that they face is drug resistance: even if a certain therapy is at first successful in reducing the tumor’s size, patients sometimes develop a resistance to it, whether it be genetic or non-genetic, and the therapy stops working. To use a tech metaphor, genetic drug resistance is akin to a hardware problem, whereas non-genetic drug resistance is more similar to a software malfunction. Since non-genetic resistance is much more dynamic, it’s harder to measure and combat — this is what Stefanie and her fellow researchers have been studying for the past few years. They discovered a pivotal mechanism that governs critical transcriptional resistance pathways, i.e., that stops cancer drug resistance as it emerges without interfering with cancer-unrelated pathways.
TOLREMO recently completed its Series A financing, bringing their total amount raised to USD 39M. Their ultimate goal is to prove the efficacy of their treatment and join forces with a larger pharma company.
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