Immusoft Corporation

Immusoft’s mission is to develop a breakthrough platform for delivering targeted medicines — programming a patient’s own cells to become miniature drug factories.

Founder and CEO Matthew Scholz conceived the concept in 2008. A computer scientist by training, Scholz reasoned that since the human body is fundamentally a complex information-based system written in DNA, it should be possible to program the body like we program computers.

To explore that possibility, Scholz spent over 18 months before founding Immusoft consulting dozens of the world’s top scientists in molecular biology, immunology, and genetic engineering, many of whom he was able to later recruit as advisors. His quest also led him to the lab of Nobel Laureate David Baltimore at Caltech, where he uncovered an innovation that became the basis for Immusoft’s core technology.

Founded in 2009, Immusoft has already had achieved some significant success. All major research milestones have been met, which has validated that the core technology works and is viable. In addition to our distinguished list of academic and scientific advisors, we have recruited top advisors in biotech commercialization. We have received grants from the National Institutes of Health and Peter Thiel's Breakout Labs as well as support from private investors, including the former head of preclinical development at Seattle Genetics. Finally, we have an exclusive license option on our core technology from Caltech and have filed two additional patents covering our extensive modifications to the technology.

Today Immusoft is seeking funding to perform additional preclinical animal studies in preparation of our clinical trials.

Our technology turns cells into miniature drug factories

It’s no secret that DNA instructs cells to make antibodies, enzymes, peptides and every protein in the body. Immusoft has developed a commercially viable way to use DNA as “source code” to instruct the human body to produce a desired therapeutic protein (biologic) to fight a specific disease.

Once optimized, the process will be revolutionarily simple: The patient will go to the clinic for a simple blood draw, and then the patient’s own cells will be “programmed” by Immusoft’s proprietary technology to start producing the specific biologic needed to treat his or her disease. The programmed cells will be injected back into the patient, where they will start their ongoing mission of delivering a consistent and sustained dose of the biologic. One treatment could last for years.

So, what does that mean for the patient? Today there are scores of rare and orphaned diseases that inflict such a small portion of the population, it’s not commercially viable to find a treatment. Or, in some cases, there is a biologic available that could treat the disease, but it requires the patient to undergo a lifetime of regular, sometimes daily, injections. Immsoft’s platform technology will eliminate these hurdles, opening new frontiers in biomedicine.

Early stage results have been promising

We’ve successfully completed our proof of concept and every milestone to date. Specifically, we’ve taken human cells from a simple blood draw and reprogrammed them to produce very rare, potent antibodies against HIV, as well as missing enzymes from people with rare genetic diseases. We’ve tested our technology in mice and the cells have demonstrated long-term survival, which was a critical finding.

We are two years away from human trials

We’re working with prominent experimental HIV medicine scientists at the University of California, San Francisco to conduct our first human trials and collaborating with leading biopharmaceutical companies to advance our rare disease treatments. Our next steps will be to scale up to clinical-grade production with our collaborators at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and get approval from the FDA to begin our human clinical trials as early as 2016.