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The Vivere team. L-R: Dave Schaffer, John Dueber, Melissa Kotterman, Noem Noiwangklang, Hyuncheol Lee, Adam Schieferecke. Photo taken during JP Morgan Healthcare week in SF. Courtesy Vivere.

Seeing the Tumors Again: How Vivere Oncotherapies is Unmasking Cancer

“One of the ways tumors grow within the body is that they can hide from the immune system, says Melissa Kotterman, CEO of Bakar Bio Labs’ newest tenant, Vivere Oncotherapies. “Our technology helps the immune system see the tumors again. We can wake up the immune system and say, ‘Hey, there’s a tumor over here, you can come get it.’” Vivere is engineering a platform to carry and improve the performance of oncolytic viruses that invade and replicate within the cancer cells, signalling the immune system to attack the tumor. Co-founders Hyuncheol Lee and Adam Schieferecke have shown that the engineering platform can be used to improve distribution through the tumor, decrease the tumor size, and increase survival compared to a non-engineered version in a mouse model of colorectal cancer.
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Perlumi's Chris Eiben at the bench.

Tenant Spotlight: Perlumi’s Plan to Perfect Photosynthesis 

“We can’t make more land, so we need to be more efficient with it. One way to do this is to make plants fundamentally better at photosynthesis. If you make photosynthesis better, you solve a lot of problems at the same time. You increase food security, you can pull CO2 out of the atmosphere for the long term, and you can spare land for biodiversity.”  Read post
The Catena team (L-R: Samantha Brady, Chanez Symister, Maxwell Nguyen, Marco Lobba) at the opening launch event for Bakar Labs and the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub. UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser.

Tenant Spotlight: Catena Biosciences and Next-Generation Protein Coupling

How can we direct therapeutics to where we want them to take effect? Often the solution lies in attaching, or conjugating, a therapy to another molecule that performs the targeting function. “We discovered a new protein conjugation process that allowed us to build things like CRISPR base editors,” says Catena CEO and co-founder Marco Lobba. “It’s not just applicable to Cas9, but also to antibodies, cell-based therapies, and several other types of new drugs." Read post