{"id":64275,"title":"EUGIT Therapeutics – Next generation T cell based cancer immunotherapy","tagline":"Engineered gamma delta T-cells for off-the-shelf treatment of cancers","body":"We are a therapeutics company that is developing immune cell based therapy for treatment of breast, ovarian and prostate cancers.\n\n**Problem**\n\nCancer remains an unsolved problem – it is expected that 1.8M new cancer cases and 0.6M cancer deaths will occur this year in the US (source CDC). Although development of immunotherapies such as checkpoint inhibitors and CAR-T cells have shown remarkable clinical success, they work for only a few cancer types. In particular, they do not work for some of the most common types of cancers in women (breast and ovarian) and men (prostate).\n\n**Solution**\n\nBuilding upon the discoveries of the founders, EUGIT Therapeutics is engineering cancer-fighting immune cells known as the gamma delta T cells which overcome the limitations of existing cancer immunotherapies.\n\n**How it works**\n\nWe take blood from healthy donors and isolate a specific type of immune cell called the gamma delta T cell and then endow them with cancer fighting activity via gene engineering. Our engineered T cells can be used off-the-shelf and ready for infusion into cancer patients.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=64275\u0026key=user_uploads/588526/a5ffcb03-a060-4080-9d9b-df2e92e6e72f)\n\n**Founders**\n\n[George Church](https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-church-2b86301/) (Co-Founder and Scientific Advisor): George is a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and leads Synthetic Biology at the Wyss Institute. His innovations have contributed to nearly all \"next generation\" DNA sequencing methods and companies (CGI-BGI, Life, Illumina, Nanopore). This plus his lab's work on chip-DNA-synthesis, gene editing and stem cell engineering resulted in founding additional application-based companies spanning fields of medical diagnostics ( Knome/PierianDx, Alacris, AbVitro/Juno, Genos, Veritas Genetics ) \u0026 synthetic biology / therapeutics ( Joule, Gen9, Editas, Egenesis, enEvolv, WarpDrive ). \n\n[Nizar Batada](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nizar-batada/) (Co-Founder and CEO): Nizar is a cancer biologist with over 20 years of experience working in genomics and cancer research. He did his PhD at Stanford and postdoc with George Church. Previously, he was a tenure track group leader at the University of Edinburgh where he directed a research lab that focused on cancer immunology. Before founding EUGIT therapeutics, he was a senior scientist at 23andMe’s Therapeutics division. The current work he is pursuing at EUGIT therapeutics is based on his discovery of a subtype of tumor infiltrating gamma delta T cells that are associated with good clinical outcomes in breast cancer. ","slug":"Gih-eugit-therapeutics-next-generation-t-cell-based-cancer-immunotherapy","created_at":"2022-07-01T19:56:00.640Z","updated_at":"2026-05-25T01:04:28.213Z","total_vote_count":20,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Gih-eugit-therapeutics-next-generation-t-cell-based-cancer-immunotherapy","share_image_url":"//bookface-static.ycombinator.com/assets/ycdc/yc-og-image-c440a0ad1dacfb86eeeb343717479cc54d256614449b4ef719977a0a451f8bc8.png","company":{"id":26427,"name":"Eugit Therapeutics","slug":"eugit-therapeutics","url":"http://www.eugittx.com","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/a88b74cc086730f852f068c605f2dcaa54b40a16.png","batch":"Summer 2022","industry":"Healthcare","tags":["Cell Therapy","Synthetic Biology","Therapeutics","Oncology","Biotechnology"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/26427"}}