Delphia launched in May 2024 with the goal of forcing malignant cells to overactivate and die.
Delphia didn’t just have to introduce itself to the world when it broke out of stealth in May 2024; it had to debut an entirely new type of cancer therapeutic.
Activation lethality flips the script on traditional cancer inhibition strategies. Instead of killing cancer cells outright, as chemo and radiation do, or unleashing the immune system to attack the cancer, as checkpoint inhibitors and other immunotherapies do, activation lethality involves forcing cancer cells to overactivate, which overloads cell stress pathways and ultimately causes cell death.
“What we’re doing at Delphia, it’s rooted in the core strengths of target therapy oncology, but we’re doing something fundamentally very different,” CEO Kevin Marks told BioSpace in a January interview at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.
His task at the meeting was to introduce the company and its science, not necessarily to sign an imminent deal, he said. “It’s about tomorrow and the day after tomorrow more than about today.”
Delphia, which launched with $67 million in series A funds including contributions from Google Ventures (GV), began from a “kernel of an idea” while Marks was working at GV to guard targeted therapies from resistance. After finding a particular activation lethality target to focus on, he wondered if it was a one-off situation or if there may be more cancers that would bow to the modality.
He followed the research, and a “trail of breadcrumbs” led him to Bill Sellers, director of the cancer program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. They realized that there were many different cancers that could be tackled via overactivation. Marks said the founders, which also include Mike Dillon, former global head of discovery chemistry for oncology at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, essentially had a “meet cute” and Delphia was born.
“Once we had that aha moment, we were like, this is something that will become a really important paradigm in therapeutics,” Marks said.
Delphia was born in a challenging time for biotech fundraises, but Marks said the connection to GV helped get the company off the ground maybe a little easier than its peers. It was almost like “starting off on second base,” he said.
“That’s a privilege that we had,” the CEO continued. “We certainly don’t take [it] for granted, but it made that first financing a really, really successful and fast process.”
Delphia has not yet revealed its pipeline, but Marks said the first programs are in solid tumors. The company is taking a traditional precision medicine approach behind the scenes to find genetically defined groups of patients with an unmet need. While precision medicine has often led to small patient populations, Marks said activation lethality has broad application, so Delphia will not be “driving down really niche roads.”
“We’re sort of raging quickly towards our first candidate selections and then the IND-enabling studies that will follow,” Marks said.
Delphia plans to go at it alone for the lead program, but Marks did not dismiss the idea of future partnerships with other biopharma companies. “From a business perspective, we’re first movers into a whole burgeoning field of cancer biology, so there’s a breadth of opportunities and targets that we could pursue that’s probably beyond the scope that any one little company can do right now.”
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