Earli

Earli mission is to make cancer a benign experience by turning cancer against itself. Earli creates genetic constructs that turn on only in cancer cells and then re-program the cancer cells to produce their own therapies, to kill themselves. Earli has been funded by Andreessen Horowitz's a16z Bio+Health Fund, Khosla Ventures, Perceptive Advisors, Sands Capital, Marc Benioff, Menlo Ventures, Accenture Ventures, Han River Partners (S Korea). Earli is based in Redwood City, California. For decades, the vision has been dreamed about to one day “program disease cells to kill or cure themselves.” If disease cells could be taken control of, they could be forced to run “injected biologic programs” to attack themselves or activate the body’s immune system to fight the disease. Standing in the way is a fundamental unsolved questions in medicine: how to correctly distinguish healthy cells from disease cells. For cancer, many attempts have been made to “kill the bad cells while not killing the good ones.” The conventional approaches are still crude; they attack both cancers and patients, or don't produce any response at all. Earli turns the approach to targeting cancer cells on its head. Based on original research at Stanford University and subsequent 7 years of research at Earli, the company has built programmable genetic constructs that can infiltrate any cells but use conditional logic inside the cell nucleus to determine if a cell is a cancer cell, or not. The construct switches on only in cancer cells, then forcing them to become "factories" that produce encoded proteins that activate the immune system to attack and ultimately kill the cancer. In essence, the cancer cells are forced to produce their own therapies.