About

About us

At Humane Genomics, we use a first-principle approach to designing oncolytic viral therapies. With a dedicated team of experts and the guidance of world-class advisors, we are on a mission to revolutionize cancer treatment by leveraging the potential of RNA viruses to selectively target and eradicate cancer cells.

Why Our Viral Therapies Stand Out

We began by asking the question: What are the most important characteristics of an OVT?
And then we designed our therapies to have these characteristics.

  • Unparalleled Safety. By employing both selective infection and selective replication, we ensure that our therapies target only cancer cells, guaranteeing high safety standards.
  • Highly Lytic. We use RNA viruses, which are highly lytic to ensure the efficient killing of cancer cells.
  • Predictive Translation. Because our therapies rely on viral cell lysis as their primary therapeutic mechanism, they predictively translate from in vitro studies to in vivo models and ultimately to human applications.
  • Maximized Therapeutic Duration. Engineered to have a low immunogenicity, our therapies achieve an extended therapeutic duration without premature neutralization by the body’s immune system.
  • Systemic Delivery. Designed for systemic administration, our therapies optimize the chance of addressing any present metastasis.
  • Cost-Effective Production. Our therapies are highly replicative viruses, making them both potent and efficient to manufacture.

 

Our Cutting-Edge Platform

Engineering RNA viruses efficiently remains challenging, even with today’s technology. We pride ourselves on our state-of-the-art platform, specifically developed to expedite the design and testing of our oncolytic viruses.

Here’s how it works:

  • Computer-Aided Design. We design our therapeutics digitally, with the following benefits:
    • Utilization of validated building blocks from our library and new ones from literature, combined to create functional DNA.
    • The freedom to design – changing base pairs or whole genes, tailored to specific needs.
    • Able to codon optimize, enhancing or reducing replication speed as needed.
    • Optimization of the design for synthesis, followed by assembly using synthetic DNA.
  • DNA Synthesis. We collaborate with external services for DNA synthesis, ensuring:
    • Sequence-perfect DNA, paving the way for a high-quality pipeline.
    • Rapid advancements in synthesis capabilities, resulting in successfully making more challenging designs, longer fragments, larger quantities, and reduced costs.
  • Making the genome and rescuing the virus. 
    • We assemble the synthesized fragments to form the complete viral genome.
    • Cells are then transfected, leading to virus production. These are subsequently tested for efficacy. (Read more about the science of engineering virus)

 

The Power of Vesicular Stomatitis Virus

Our therapies are based on Vesicular Stomatitis Virus (VSV) due to its many advantages:

  • Ease of Retargeting. The VSV virus can be modified to target specific cancer cells, by changing the glycoprotein.
  • Highly Lytic Nature. Ensures fast and effective killing of cancer cells.
  • Linear Genome. This simplifies engineering of the viral genome.
  • Well-Researched. The VSV virus is well-understood, thanks to extensive research.
  • Low Seroprevalence. Minimizes the risk of the body’s immune system neutralizing the therapy prematurely.

 

Our publications

For reference, here a list of our publications in chronological order: