About Us
The ambition
to cure
OUR UNIQUE APPROACH
With a vision to optimize the therapeutic potential of cells to cure disease, KSQ began by developing a completely modality-agnostic approach and performing genome-scale knockouts across a wide array of cancer and immune cells.
Surprisingly, no one had ever done this before. These gene knockouts provided us with a multitude of novel insights that led us to discover a number of high-value, novel targets that we are now transforming into innovative medicines to treat diseases with high unmet medical needs.
While we continue to optimize our CRISPRomics® platform for ourselves and our partners, we are initially focusing our in-house development efforts on advancing engineered tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (eTILs®) as personalized cell therapy treatments for a range of intractable solid-tumor cancers.
The etil® advantage
for solid tumors
Cell therapies and immuno-oncology therapies have certainly improved patient options for care. However, the evolution of cancer cells and the hostile tumor microenvironment (TME) they create continue to present persistent challenges to these approaches. By their very nature, TILs seem like an ideal cell therapy, as they have already successfully navigated through the TME and entered the tumor. In fact, the first TIL therapy has now been approved in the U.S. for the treatment of melanoma.
High unmet need
90% of all cancer cases are solid tumors.
More than 350,000 people die in the U.S. every year from solid tumor cancers.
How does our approach improve upon this?
Through our genome-wide screens, we have discovered two novel targets that, when knocked out either alone or in combination, supercharge the TIL, significantly enhancing its ability to not only infiltrate a tumor, but to kill it. Our personalized, engineered cell therapies have also demonstrated good durability of effect in in vivo studies to date.
In addition, using our proprietary ExPRESS™ manufacturing process, we believe our eTILs can overcome many of the existing obstacles facing non-engineered cell therapies, while also broadening potential target indications, widening the eligible patient pool, and lessening the patient burden.
We are currently advancing multiple eTIL therapies into clinical development, while also exploring additional therapeutic indications and cell therapy modalities both through expansion of our platform and through our partnerships.
