Startup Creates Food Brand for Cancer Treatment

The notion of curing—not just preventing—cancer through food rather than therapies including drugs, radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery has been an elusive goal as scientists around the globe pursue eradication of man’s most fearful disease.

But has a startup biotech company led by a Stanford University–educated scientist and an accomplished genetics entrepreneur come up with a way of doing just that?

The company, Filtricine, has developed and already is marketing a range of medical food products based on the mechanism of depleting certain nonessential amino acids from the diet. Its lineup of Tality brand foods includes shakes, soups, and nutrition bars.

Many tumors feed on nonessential amino acids that aren’t needed for human nutrition but that the cancers take in from the bloodstream, and the company’s principals say Filtricine’s products can starve these tumors with a restricted diet.

“Cancer cells grow faster than normal cells and need more nutrients, and nutrients that normal cells don’t need,” explains Mike Partsuf, senior food scientist for Filtricine. Normal cells will be OK by definition without these nonessential amino acids, but the cancer cells will starve, he says.

Grace Yang, a Stanford PhD who is cofounder, chief operating officer, and vice president of research of Filtricine and co-inventor of the technology, notes, “There are methods for detecting some cancer in patients’ bodies, but when it’s too early to do treatments like surgery or chemotherapy, they can use our products.”

A big yellow flag goes up, of course, when it comes to any approach that purports to mitigate cancer through food. Diet clearly can play both preventive and curative roles with other scourges of the human condition, including diabetes and heart disease. But while many drugs have improved outcomes for cancer sufferers, it’s quite another thing to claim that any food can play a helpful role in addressing the ravaging disease that fells so many.

One estimable expert who endorses the possibilities of food is medicine is Peter Barton Hutt. The former chief counsel for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says he essentially “created medical food in the 1960s” and worked with early synthesizers of amino acids. And though he declines to comment specifically on the prospects of Filtricine’s ultimate success, Hutt did sign on as a regulatory advisor for the company, and he’s bullish about what medical foods can accomplish.

The key understanding about the capabilities of medical foods, Hutt says, is that they are “for dietary management of disease,” a standard that he helped the FDA develop. And the most important way to judge the legitimacy of any medical food, Hutt says, is “adequate clinical trials. The same type of trial required for a drug would be needed for any kind of medical claim.”

Research Results

That’s exactly what Filtricine’s founders say they’ve done. After extensive work with mice, Stanford recently conducted a clinical trial with 10 prostate cancer patients, and Filtricine’s regimen stopped or reversed tumor growth in three-quarters of the patients with high PSA (prostate-specific antigen) levels, a common indicator of prostate cancer.

A second-generation product the company developed has already been tested in mice. Yang says it is “drastically better” and will be tested in additional clinical trials.

So far, Filtricine has deployed its regimen in a diet that allows patients to consume supplementation by limited amounts of complete-protein food and tea, black coffee, and other beverages that are protein free in addition to its shakes, soups, and bars. As it seeks Series A venture funding of $7 million to cover two years of operations, Filtricine is focusing on sales to hospitals, clinics, and other health-care institutions.

It is discussing partnerships with major CPG companies, including Nestlé and Abbott. Filtricine recently signed a deal for pet food development with Hill’s Pet Nutrition, a unit of Colgate Palmolive. Yang says the company’s products can benefit pets as well as humans. And, she adds, the company is working on a deal with Charoen Pokphand Group, one of the largest companies in Thailand and a major agro-industry and food player in Asia.

Not just the clinical trial results but also Filtricine’s pedigree may be attracting investors and partners. The company is a spinout from genomics expert Michael Snyder’s lab at Stanford. The company’s CEO is John Chant, who has a PhD in genetics and whose 40-year record of achievement in commercializing genetics culminated in a series of CEO positions before the one at Filtricine.

Filtricine’s regimen is “most effective in people with advanced cancer,” Partsuf says. “It’s an addition, and we don’t tell people to discontinue therapy. But it works as well as chemotherapy, pretty much,” he says.

The company also has demonstrated the effectiveness of its products in cutting lipids production in a small clinical trial in humans, and in promoting longevity in mice. Yang says Filtricine is exploring the cancer prevention possibilities for its approach, too. “Imagine patients having this food for one or two months every year,” she says, “to purge cancer cells out of the body.”ft