Dispatch Bio raises $216 million for solid tumor immunotherapy

Angus Chen covers all issues broadly related to cancer including drugs, policy, science, and equity. He joined STAT in 2021 after covering health and science at NPR and NPR affiliate stations. His work has been recognized by national Edward R. Murrow awards, the June L. Biedler prize for cancer journalism, and more. You can reach Angus on Signal at angus.08.

Precision therapy, where medicines become ever more specific to certain mutations in certain tumors, is often touted as the future of oncology. But a new company called Dispatch Bio is taking the opposite approach and trying to go as wide as possible. Instead of tailoring the right therapy to the right patient, Dispatch is developing a new, universal approach to try to treat any cancer using immunotherapy.

The key to this approach is a synthetic protein, called the “flare” antigen, which Dispatch’s therapy aims to install on every cancer cell in a patient’s body. Once there, the company can direct immunotherapies to attack that protein and kill the cancer carrying it, wherever it is in the body and whatever cancer type it may be. 

“Too many strategies that have come before seem to solve a single problem or a single disease,” Lex Johnson, the Dispatch’s chief platform officer, said in a video on the company’s website. “The universality of Dispatch’s approach is really derived from the engineering we did around this unique flare protein.”