About Us

The ambition
to cure

Our origins

With a mission to use gene-editing to explore the entirety of the genome, KSQ has industrialized genome-wide CRISPR/Cas9® functional genomic screens across a wide array of cancer models and immune cell types, seeking to identify the genome’s top therapeutic targets. We call this approach CRISPRomics®.

No one had done this before. This approach has provided us with a multitude of novel biological insights that we have transformed into innovative therapeutic candidates to treat diseases with high unmet medical needs.

We have the ambition to cure. Our pipeline has the potential to deliver on this promise.

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The Solid Tumor challenge

Despite recent advances, there remain significant needs in the treatment of solid tumors, which make up 90% of all cancers. While recent treatment innovations, including immunotherapies, have improved patient care, the CDC reports that more than 600,000 people die of cancer in the U.S. every year. The constant evolution and highly personalized nature of cancer cells and their remarkable ability to impede a patient’s immune response continue to challenge currently available therapies’ ability to selectively kill them, whether by targeted therapies or by engaging the immune system.

We believe our CRISPRomics platform has generated the genomic insights that will enable us to overcome this challenge.

High unmet need

90% of all cancer cases are solid tumors.

More than 600,000 people die in the U.S. every year from solid tumor cancers.

OUR UNIQUE SOLUTION — eTIL® THERAPY

By their very nature, Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes (TIL) are an ideal therapy for the treatment of solid tumors, as they are a patient’s personalized immune response against cancer cells and possess broad, polyclonal T cell receptor-mediated recognition of cancer cells. This polyclonality provides TIL with the potential to eliminate every last cancer cell, even if the cancer cell evolves. In fact, the first TIL therapy has now been approved in the U.S. for the treatment of melanoma. Despite this promise, however, for many patients, TIL therapy unfortunately falls short.

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CRISPR/Cas9
eTIL® Therapy

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So, how does our approach improve upon this?

We seek to maximize the tumor-killing activity of TIL therapy by knocking out our top CRISPRomics-discovered targets, SOCS1 and Regnase-1, in TIL using CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing creating engineered Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocyte, or eTIL® therapies. In our animal models to date, inactivation of Regnase-1 and SOCS1 has demonstrated a remarkable ability to boost the ability of T cells to infiltrate and kill tumors, even in settings where no other therapies work.

By engineering into each TIL best-in-biology anti-tumor activity, we believe eTIL therapies may solve the intractable efficacy obstacles facing patients currently receiving T cell therapies in the treatment of solid tumors.

We believe our eTIL programs may be a solution to the Solid Tumor Challenge.

We are currently advancing multiple eTIL therapeutic candidates while continuing to discover novel cure-capable therapeutics using our CRISPRomics platform and through our partnerships.

Leadership

Board Of Directors

Scientific advisors
  • Michal Besser, PhD CTO, Davidoff Canter, Rabin Medical Center
  • Jason Bock, PhD Co-founder and CEO, CTMC
  • Shari Pilon-Thomas, PhD Moffitt Cancer Center, Co-Director of CIIRC
  • Chantale Bernatchez, PhD Head of Process Development, CTMC
  • Kathy Siedl, PhD Head, Oncology Drug Discovery Unit, Takeda