Volastra was founded.
Partnering
Our Partnering Philosophy
We are pioneering a transformative way to treat cancer – and we know we can’t do it alone. Coming up with novel ways to treat cancer requires the ingenuity, passion and dedication of many. We value unique thinkers who approach problems differently.
At the same time, creating a team of unique thinkers sometimes means bringing in external partners with different perspectives. We seek partners that share our CORE VALUES: curiosity, unity, rigor and energy. We are eager to build a community that can make real progress toward helping people with cancer.
We're Looking For...
The right partner.
That can mean many different things. We pride ourselves on a flexible approach to collaboration.
To any partnership, we bring a world-class team and expertise in biology, computational biology, immunology and chemistry. We are exploring partnerships focused around target and drug discovery.
Currently, we are focused on fostering collaborations to identify:
Targets specifically lethal to CIN-high cancers
We seek to identify specific vulnerabilities in CIN-high cancer cells that make them susceptible to therapies while leaving healthy cells intact.
Targets that reactivate the immune system against CIN-high cancers
By identifying genes responsible for allowing cancer cells to evade the immune system, we hope to create therapies that activate specific immune signaling pathways to launch an attack on tumors.
Current Partnerships
Collaboration is what drives success at Volastra, both within our walls and beyond. We’re proud to partner with several leading organizations to advance our science and create a new class of cancer therapies.
2019
2020
We have an ongoing license agreement with Weill Cornell Medicine, a leading clinical and medical center, for access to their primary and metastatic organoids. These three-dimensional tissue models let us test our ideas more accurately than we could with animal models alone.
2021
The tumor organoid technology we license from HUB allows us to grow organoids in our lab and use them for preclinical research. HUB was founded by the Hubrecht Institute, the University Medical Center Utrecht and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences to refine organoid development and foster organoid adoption globally. Hans Clevers, one of HUB’s founders, is a member of Volastra scientific advisory board.
Our partnership brings together our expertise in cancer biology with Dewpoint’s pioneering platform for targeting condensates to identify drug candidates that can stop cancer growth and progression. The partnership is initially focused on early drug discovery, with the option for future joint development and commercialization.
Our collaboration with Microsoft integrates our insights into tumor biology with Microsoft’s AI to develop machine learning tools to detect drivers of tumor growth and predictors of outcomes. Our specific partnership aims to create automated tools capable of rapidly and accurately measuring the rate and state of chromosomal instability and other features of tumor growth and progression.