Nature is full of biochemical surprises. With millions of species all engaged in complicated interactions with one another whose stakes are no less than survival, across millions of years of Earth’s biotic history, the sheer diversity of substances and strategies biologists have discovered boggles the mind. From ancient days of heart medication derived from foxglove plants to recent commercialization of analgesics derived from cone snail venom, nature is a boundless source of new medicines for biotechnology firms to discover and develop. Peel Therapeutics is taking advantage of that largess to reshape cancer treatment, and it starts with elephants.
Elephants are long-lived animals, with lifespans comparable to humans, but unlike humans, they rarely get cancer. This fact has puzzled scientists for generations, and research eventually showed that they have enhanced protective proteins throughout their cell-division pathways, in particular an enhanced p53. Mutations that disable or damage p53 are well implicated in human cancer, so the prospect of bringing this enhanced p53 to humans, via some manner of gene or cell therapy, inspired Dr. Joshua Shiffman, founder and CEO of Peel Therapeutics, to focus his efforts on this sort of problem. Shiffman even named his nascent company, partly based in Israel, after the Hebrew word for elephant.
Shiffman describes Peel Therapeutics’s general modus operandi as follows: “Evolution has done that same thing [generating novel substances] over hundreds of millions of years, right? It took 55 million years, 55 million years of research and development for an elephant to become an elephant and become cancer-resistant. I don’t care how smart of a scientist you are, even if you’re my co-founder, Dr. Avi Schroeder, you’re never going to beat 55 million years of tinkering of evolution to get the exact perfect cancer fighting protein. And that’s where Peel steps in, we say, ‘Okay, thank you very much evolution, we’ll take it from here.’”
A similar collaborative spirit and desire to take every advantage of opportunities as they arise shows itself in Peel’s history as a firm. Building Peel Therapeutics required a keen eye for potential collaborators, from its co-founder to nanotech pioneer Dr. Pieter Cullis of Nanovations, and to recognize when other innovations in biotech might help them turn molecules in nature into usable medicine. Dr. Shiffman, a former medical doctor, hopes that the nanotechnological lipid-based delivery systems used for current mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines may yet be deployed for Peel Therapeutics drugs based on elephant p53 and other interesting molecules they have discovered but not yet brought to market.
To learn more about Dr. Shiffman, Peel Therapeutics, and learning from nature as part of biotechnological research, have a listen to our podcast.
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