Eugit Therapeutics
Enabling Tissue Targeting of Therapies
Eugit Therapeutics targets the issue of non-specific drugs that cause toxicity and clinical trial failures, affecting millions with tissue-specific inflammatory diseases. TAGHOME delivers drugs with precision to diseased tissues using T cell receptors, enhancing safety and improving efficacy. Our initial focus is on the 3.1 million U.S. individuals with Inflammatory Bowel Disease, aiming to initiate clinical trials within two years. Cofounded by George Church (Harvard) and funded by Y Combinator (S22).
Active Founders
Nizar Batada
Nizar is the co-founder and CEO at EUGIT, which he started with George Church in 2022. He is an expert in cancer research, genomics and bioinformatics and has published over 25 articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature and has obtained nationally competitive grants. Prior to EUGIT, he was a scientist at 23andMe and a tenure track lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Nizar grew up in Toronto and obtained his PhD in Biophysics from Stanford.
Company Launches
We are a therapeutics company that is developing immune cell based therapy for treatment of breast, ovarian and prostate cancers.
Problem
Cancer remains an unsolved problem – it is expected that 1.8M new cancer cases and 0.6M cancer deaths will occur this year in the US (source CDC). Although development of immunotherapies such as checkpoint inhibitors and CAR-T cells have shown remarkable clinical success, they work for only a few cancer types. In particular, they do not work for some of the most common types of cancers in women (breast and ovarian) and men (prostate).
Solution
Building upon the discoveries of the founders, EUGIT Therapeutics is engineering cancer-fighting immune cells known as the gamma delta T cells which overcome the limitations of existing cancer immunotherapies.
How it works
We take blood from healthy donors and isolate a specific type of immune cell called the gamma delta T cell and then endow them with cancer fighting activity via gene engineering. Our engineered T cells can be used off-the-shelf and ready for infusion into cancer patients.
Founders
George Church (Co-Founder and Scientific Advisor): George is a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and leads Synthetic Biology at the Wyss Institute. His innovations have contributed to nearly all "next generation" DNA sequencing methods and companies (CGI-BGI, Life, Illumina, Nanopore). This plus his lab's work on chip-DNA-synthesis, gene editing and stem cell engineering resulted in founding additional application-based companies spanning fields of medical diagnostics ( Knome/PierianDx, Alacris, AbVitro/Juno, Genos, Veritas Genetics ) & synthetic biology / therapeutics ( Joule, Gen9, Editas, Egenesis, enEvolv, WarpDrive ).
Nizar Batada (Co-Founder and CEO): Nizar is a cancer biologist with over 20 years of experience working in genomics and cancer research. He did his PhD at Stanford and postdoc with George Church. Previously, he was a tenure track group leader at the University of Edinburgh where he directed a research lab that focused on cancer immunology. Before founding EUGIT therapeutics, he was a senior scientist at 23andMe’s Therapeutics division. The current work he is pursuing at EUGIT therapeutics is based on his discovery of a subtype of tumor infiltrating gamma delta T cells that are associated with good clinical outcomes in breast cancer.