Seeing the Tumors Again: How Vivere Oncotherapies is Unmasking Cancer
By Chrissa Olson.
“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.
For Melissa, Vivere represents the chance to build on the gene therapy knowledge she gained while earning her PhD under Dave Schaffer, a UC Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and, since 2022, director of Bakar Labs. Melissa and Dave, with others, co-founded the companies 4D Molecular Therapeutics and IGNITE Immunotherapy.
The challenge of pushing technology forward was something Melissa always wanted to take on. Rather than just publishing papers, she wanted to translate these ideas to help real people. That’s why it was so exciting for her to see Vivere’s therapy show promising results in recent animal testing.
Vivere spun out of research in Dave’s lab and that of Berkeley bioengineering professor John Dueber. By 2022, Melissa and her co-founding team of Hyuncheol, Adam, and Wanichaya “Noem” Noiwangklang raised their first pre-seed round of $1.45 million, which they have been operating on for the past three years.
Berkeley is home for Melissa, the technology, and all the co-founders – so Bakar Bio Labs was a natural place to stay. (For two years, she was CSO at Iris Medicine, also a tenant.)
The most important lesson Melissa has taken away from building up the company here is that “you can’t do it alone.” “This is a team game. The hard times are less hard, the easy times are more fun, when you have a great team working together,” Melissa says. “We all have known each other for a really long time, individually and as a group, so we’re all really close knit, we feel like we can talk to each other about anything.”
Her work hits home as well – she has a history of cancer in her family. She lost her uncle to cancer, and recently her cousin to glioblastoma.
With the potential for wide-spread impact with Vivere, she wants to help flip the script. Instead of patients asking at the initial cancer diagnosis, “How long do I have to live?”, she hopes to make the immediate question, “How can I fight?”
“We have the chance to provide better treatment opportunities to patients that have tried chemotherapy and it didn’t work, or there’s not an effective treatment for the type of cancer they have,” Melissa says. “I want to live in a world where they feel like they’ve really got a shot to fight and overcome it.”
