When it comes to cancer treatment, patients often must try several combinations of drugs before finding one that shrinks their tumors. Meanwhile, they may have endured weeks of side effects from chemotherapy.
Dr. Frank Lau, who launched a Portland startup, devised a way to find the most targeted treatment in less time, at a lower cost and without the discomfort to patients.
Keliomics, based in the OTRADI Bioscience Incubator on Portland’s South Waterfront, claims to be the first lab to keep human fat alive outside the body and the only one that can stably culture human tissues and tumors in vitro — essentially allowing for human testing without human subjects, Lau said.
“The main advantage is the patients aren’t their own guinea pigs,” Lau said.
Keliomics has been working with labs at major universities and is piloting its platform with Legacy Health for breast and ovarian cancers.
“Cells behave differently, depending on the environment they’re in,” Lau explained. “Cancer cells growing on hard plastic don’t behave near to the way cancer cells behave in the body. This brings it much closer to how it behaves in the human body.”
The technology has the potential to shorten the bench-to-patient pipeline. Currently, clinical trials are expensive and take years to run. Only 5% of drug candidates eventually receive Food and Drug Administration approval.
“What that tells us is the models they’re using aren’t accurate, they don’t reflect what happens in patients,” Lau said.
Growing human fat
Lau, who is originally from the Bay Area, received his undergraduate degree in molecular biochemistry and biophysics in just three years from Yale University. He went on to the University of Michigan Medical School, graduating with research honors, followed by a residency in plastic surgery at Harvard University.
In an uncommon move, Lau took two years off mid-residency to pursue a research fellowship at a stem cell lab, where he was tasked with growing human fat in a petri dish. No one had figured out how to keep human fat alive outside the body, and Lau couldn’t solve the problem either at the time.
He returned to his plastic surgery residency just as the field was “undergoing a revolution” in the form of fat grafting, where fat is taken from one part of the body using liposuction and injected into another part for reconstructive purposes, he said. The technique took off in breast reconstruction, in particular.
The process triggered a new insight for him, in light of his work in the stem cell lab. The third piece of the puzzle leading to Keliomics, Lau said, fell into place when he was a visiting scientist at Boston University’s tissue engineering department and he learned how to transfer an entire sheet of cells, rather than one at a time.
“You could stack multiple sheets of muscle cells on top of each other,” Lau said. “Where Keliomics’ technology was born was I combined those three insights. Now we can take fatty tissues and sandwich them between sheets of their own stem cells and it all stays alive in vitro.”
He developed the Keliomics platform in 2015 while teaching plastic surgery at Louisiana State University’s medical school, where he still teaches half time.
The business
Lau moved to Portland after meeting his now-wife, a Portlander. But he also prefers the business environment in the state.
“Here in Oregon, there are wonderful systemic efforts to stand up the biotech community,” he said. “Also, you have investors here willing to invest in biotech.”
Keliomics has had funding from Elevate Capital and state-back science commercialization investor ONAMI, and Lau said he is “gearing up for talks with larger institutional investors.” The company also received a $100,000 investment from venture fund Ideaship at the Angel Oregon Life & Bioscience finale in May.
Keliomics' OncoTrials division tests investigational new drugs that are in or about to enter Phase 1 or 2 human clinical trials. OncoTrials allows labs to quantify an investigational drug’s efficacy at a cost savings of 85% or more, according to Keliomics’ website.
The company procures healthy, discarded adipose tissue (as from breast reduction surgery), and processes it into hundreds of cancer micro-environments. The client can select fatty tissue donor characteristics, such as race/ethnicity, co-morbidities, age and gender. The same tumors can be grown in hundreds of patient tissues, providing clear insight into whether it’s the patient or the tumor that is driving the therapy’s efficacy.
The process takes about two to three weeks. Since OncoTrials produces dozens of cancer subtypes in each healthy subject, drug developers can identify the appropriate patient population before doing clinical trials, according to the company.
OncoTrials is “revenue positive” and working with labs at UC-Berkeley, Duke University and Tulane in melanoma, breast and colon cancer.
Then there’s Keliomics’ OncoScreen, which tests drugs in vitro. Keliomics is currently partnering with Legacy on a pilot study for ovarian and breast cancer, with 10 patients each.
Dr. Nathalie Johnson, surgical oncology specialist at Legacy who is working on the study with Lau, said OncoScreen would save patients and doctors from needing to try out different drug combinations they hope will work and then pivoting when they don’t.
“What is amazing about this is if we can take a tumor cell and grow it in the patient’s own fat, it recreates the micro-environment and we can give combinations and see which works and if we can tell that based on the model Keliomics developed, we’d give them one or two and spare them from all the other drugs,” Johnson said. “If we can just know if something will work or not, we can do a better job of individualizing their care.”
Keliomics
What it does: Its OnCoTrials platform provides data on the efficacy of investigational drugs before phase 1 trials in a matter of weeks and at less cost. Its OncoScreen technology is a clnical laboratory test that identifies the most effective therapies for an individual patient’s tumor.
Founder and CEO: Dr. Frank Lau
Headquarters: Portland
Employees: Six
Revenue: Not disclosed
