TareBio: Vaccines for any cancer or infection in weeks
Published in Diseases!, Financial.
TL;DR: Our platform develops personalized or population-level vaccines for any disease in weeks by changing only one input: the immune imprint. Instead of trying to predict which antigens might work, we read out immune cells already fighting the disease in the body and reverse-engineer antigens that activate them. We’ve already run our platform end-to-end and created a vaccine that cured cancer in mice. We will be vaccinating our first patient within the year.
View our launch video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty7jA8ecY2o
The vaccine bottleneck
For 200+ years, vaccines have been designed using the same workflow: study a pathogen or tumor, predict which antigens might trigger protection, vaccinate, and hopefully generate a good immune response. This works for simpler infections. It has struggled for decades on complex diseases like HIV, TB, Hep C, and nearly every cancer. Currently, vaccine design is treated as a prediction problem.
What we do differently
Instead, we treat it as a readout problem. The immune system has already solved antigen selection in the body, it knows what it’s responding to and the best immune cells for the job. So, we flip the whole process around:
- Capture the immune cells already responding to a cancer or infection, the “immune imprint“
- Use this imprint to directly identify, or “reverse engineer”, activating antigens
- Build a vaccine from those antigens
The same platform works for any disease by changing one input: the immune imprint. Function over prediction, no constrained search space, and the output is a vaccine that can generate durable immunity in the body, not a transient antibody conjugate or cellular therapy.
Proof
We built the full platform in mice and ran it end-to-end: identified antigens from the immune imprint of the cancer, designed a vaccine from them, and cured lymphoma in mice. Nothing about the technology is specific to lymphoma, it generalizes to any cancer or infection. We are using our technology to create both personalized (n=1) and population-level vaccines.
Why us
I’m Eta Atolia, founder and CEO. I built this platform over the last 8 years as part of my MD-PhD at UCLA-Caltech with funding from The Gates Foundation. Before this, I did my undergrad at MIT with most of my time dedicated to cancer immunotherapy and infectious disease research at the Koch and HMS. Our scientific advisory board includes Darrell Irvine, PhD (Vice Chair of Immunology at Scripps, Former MIT Professor of 22 years, world-renowned vaccine engineer) and Manish Butte, MD, PhD (Chief of Immunology at UCLA and expert rare disease clinician).
Our ask
We are actively working with organizations and individuals to create both population-level vaccines and personalized treatments.
Helpful things as we build:
- If you have patient tumor or blood samples, please reach out.
- Intros to biotech + pharma and vaccine teams for partnerships.
- Immunologists, oncologists, infectious disease specialists, and ML engineers who want to build this with us.
If any of this resonates, reach out at [email protected].
