WASHINGTON (DC News Now) — Cancer can be an earth-shattering diagnosis, and treating the disease can be physical and emotional.
“Forty percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lifetime, so it will touch us all in one way, shape or form,” said Dr. Martha Sklavos.
With that in mind, Sklavos developed Aloe Therapeutics and is the CEO.
“My background is as an immunologist, and also spent some time here at the National Cancer Institute as well, and then went into biotech and pharma. I was really inspired by a dear friend’s journey to really look at what can we do to treat later-stage or hard-to-treat disease,” she said.
Aloe Therapeutics’ goal is to restore anti-tumor immunity in patients, especially those with advanced disease and limited options.
“We’re still about 18 months away from a clinical trial. We’re currently raising money to get there, to get to the clinical trial and fully execute the clinical trial in a handful of solid tumors. So solid tumors or tumors like pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, melanoma, those that are mainly in advanced disease or metastatic disease,” Sklavos said.
Aloe Therapeutics took home the growth stage prize at DC Startup Week last month and a $2,500 check.
The treatment from Aloe is meant to be administered either at biopsy or through surgical tumor removal.
“It will be injected into the tumor. Our therapy is a cell-based therapy that also has another immune activator and kind of together with the cell-based system, to just make sure that we’re engaging both arms of the immune system. So, our goal is not to disrupt cancer care protocols,” Sklavos said.
Aloe Therapeutics is being tested in animals.
“And we’ve seen that it’s safe and effective in mouse models. But you really have to get to the clinic to see what you have,” Sklavos said.
The hope is that the treatment will be available in the near future for humans.
“If the results are really good, that’s when you can kind of accelerate that development path and approval. So, I would say best best-case scenario would be five, six years if everything lines up perfectly. Cancer is a very complex disease. Even if you have the same disease, even at the molecular level, it’s different in every person. And that’s what makes it so challenging,” Sklavos said.
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