CHICA­GO — A new type of tar­get­ed can­cer drug that blocks a “DNA care­tak­er” pro­tein called Wern­er he­li­case has cap­tured the at­ten­tion of sev­er­al big phar­ma com­pa­nies in re­cent years, and the first da­ta ap­pear to re­in­force its po­ten­tial.

Cells are typ­i­cal­ly equipped with crit­i­cal re­dun­dan­cies for im­por­tant pro­teins, but when they mu­tate in can­cer pa­tients, a sin­gle pro­tein can be­come the key to a cell’s life or death. By find­ing the pro­teins that aber­rant can­cer cells need to func­tion and then block­ing them, drug de­vel­op­ers are build­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of tar­get­ed can­cer treat­ments.

Roche now has the first da­ta for its ex­per­i­men­tal drug, which takes ad­van­tage of what’s known as syn­thet­ic lethal­i­ty, in gy­ne­co­log­ic and colon can­cers. It was shared this week at the Amer­i­can As­so­ci­a­tion for Can­cer Re­search’s an­nu­al meet­ing in Chica­go.

When CRISPR pi­o­neer Feng Zhang met with in­vestors to dis­cuss his new drug de­liv­ery tech­nol­o­gy over din­ner in the sum­mer of 2021, it didn’t take long to pitch the idea. By the time the ap­pe­tiz­ers ar­rived, the in­vestors were sold.

But get­ting the tech­nol­o­gy to work well enough to test in hu­mans will take longer, and in the mean­time, Zhang’s com­pa­ny, Aera Ther­a­peu­tics, is turn­ing to an old­er de­liv­ery tech­nol­o­gy for some of its first pro­grams, End­points News has learned.

The Cam­bridge, MA-based com­pa­ny ini­tial­ly fo­cused on de­vel­op­ing nov­el pro­tein nanopar­ti­cles that promised to de­liv­er CRISPR gene edit­ing ther­a­pies in­to parts of the body that lipid nanopar­ti­cles have had a hard time reach­ing, such as the brain, kid­ney and mus­cles. But now Aera is turn­ing to lipid nanopar­ti­cles for at least one of its pro­grams.