# InvVax makes it first foray into cancer! | InvVax

- Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/feed/172242
- Entity ID: wefunder:feed_item:172242
- Published at: 2024-04-05 18:40:35 UTC
- Updated at: 2025-07-09 03:24:43 UTC

## Author
Arthur Young

## Subject
InvVax

## Content
I'm excited to announce that we've expanded our pipeline into cancer! This will be very early-stage R&D. As a graduate student (yes, over 20 years ago), I had an idea to treat cancer by exploiting a universal feature of all cancers, which is the aberrant regulation of the Rb-E2F pathway. (This was the main topic of my PhD research.) E2F is a protein that drives cells into DNA replication, and Rb restrains E2F. Thus, E2F is the "gatekeeper" that determines whether a cell divides or not, and Rb is a "tumor suppressor." Every single cancer, without exception, has to have overactive E2F. What people mostly do nowadays to treat cancer is to supply drugs (called "chemotherapy") that kill replicating cells, which cancer cells are. However, there are a lot of cells in the body that are replicating normally. So most chemotherapy is not very selective, as it kills not only cancer cells but also cells lining the gut, the mucous membranes, those in hair follicles, etc. -- this is the reason for the whole plethora of nasty side effects for those undergoing chemotherapy. However, with normally replicating cells, while they have periodically active E2F, they do not have the same constantly heightened, overactive E2F that cancer cells do. Thus, I have devised a way to kill only those cells that have this overactive E2F. There are two advantages to this approach: First, it is a general approach that would apply to all human cancers -- lung, breast, brain, skin, and so on -- not just a small number of specific types of cancer. Second, this dependence on overactive E2F is a central requirement for a tumor cell to be a tumor cell; if a tumor cell loses this overactive E2F, it ceases being a tumor cell. Chemotherapeutic drugs usually eventually fail because the tumor develops resistance to it, invariably because the thing that the drug is targeting isn't absolutely essential to the tumor -- it can live without it, and so the tumor sheds it, and is then no longer susceptible to the drug. But if you target overactive E2F, the tumor can't just shed overactive E2F, because it needs it to be a tumor. It's kind of in line with the overarching theme of InvVax: target things that are absolutely essential to the entity that you are targeting. It's like you're a punk who wants to cause trouble and ruin all your neighbors' cars, so you take a chainsaw in the middle of the night and remove all the engines out of the cars on the block. (Okay, a bit of a stretch of the imagination, I'll admit.) What if someone says, "Hey, I'm going to foil your plan, by removing my car's engine myself!" Not a lot of good that would do him, because then he couldn't drive his car either. That's what we're trying to do. Now, it's a little more complicated than that; my idea involves a few more bells and whistles to try to do what no one else has been able to do who has tried a similar approach. It's kind of secret, though, so I can't exactly divulge the details. But we're just starting to get into it, and I'm pretty excited.And as always, if you'd like to invest, go here:https://wefunder.com/invvax/ask