Delphia launches to kill tumors with ‘excess’

It’s said that ancient Greeks inscribed an aphorism in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “Nothing in excess.” Enter Delphia Therapeutics, a start-up harnessing the notion of excess to stop tumors from growing.

Delphia is based on work from the lab of Bill Sellers, director of the cancer program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. A few years ago, Sellers discovered that instead of inhibiting mutated genes to stop the proliferation of cancer cells, he could dial up the activity of those oncogenes to the same effect. Cells with certain oncogenic activations in the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK), phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3K), and Wnt signaling pathways were particularly susceptible to that approach (Nat. Genet. 2023, DOI: 10.1038/s41588-023-01515-7).

In 2022, Sellers got together with Kevin Marks and Mike Dillon, two former cancer drug discovery heads from the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. Marks had just joined GV, formerly Google Ventures, as an entrepreneur in residence. The three formed Delphia with seed money from GV and began building the company that fall, with Marks as CEO.

“In oncology, cancer genetics teaches us what to drug. It’s the best teacher of what to pursue in our medicines,” Marks says. “What Bill [Sellers]discovered was that in many types of cancer, you can have too much oncogene activity. It’s lethal. It gets selected against as tumors form.”

Based at the Alexandria LaunchLabs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Delphia now has just shy of 20 employees and about $67 million in funds, thanks to a recent series A fundraising that GV also led. The financing should allow the start-up to complete preclinical work on at least one drug program.

Marks is tight-lipped about the indications Delphia is prioritizing, but he says its lead programs go after prevalent, genetically driven cancers. The start-up’s drug discovery efforts have so far been focused exclusively on small molecules. Marks says they are the best way to overactivate oncogenic pathways inside tumors without affecting other tissues.

“For 30 years now, in target therapy, we’ve been doing this script of ‘find the oncogene, inhibit the oncogene,’” Marks says. “We need medicines that work via diverse mechanisms.”