Imagine a drug designed to specifically tackle a disease you have. Imagine attacking this disease and no other healthy cell in your body, as if it were smart or, rather, programmed to do this high precision job, much like a soldier in elite on mission.
It is this type of drug that Tatum bioscience is developing from the laboratory it leases from the University of Sherbrooke. “It is a new branch of biology which uses principles of engineering, coupled with biology, to create cells which have functions that are not found in nature”, explains Sébastien Rodrigue, full professor at the Department of Biology of the University of Sherbrooke and co-founder of Tatum, founded in June 2020.
Tatum’s team of seven employees is already developing a drug based on probiotic bacteria that can attack cells that are resistant to antibiotics. Cancer treatment is his other ambitious project.
“I can program my bacteria to find tumors inside the human body”, gives Professor Rodrigue as an example. “I can program it to secrete proteins that will kill tumors, program it to generate inflammatory or anti-inflammatory effects. We can even combine these activities in a bacterium which, for its part, produces the right molecules to achieve it. ”
COURTESY PHOTO / Tatum bioscience
What distinguishes the drugs Tatum is developing from the traditional pharmacopoeia is that they are alive, rather than inert. We can therefore program the bacterium, influence it in a way, so that it acts in the desired direction. “You could tell it, kind of like a computer program, find the site of the disease, once you find it, call other bacteria and once you have enough, produce a first molecule that s ‘will attack the disease,’ illustrates Sébastien Rodrigue.
The researcher’s objective is to reduce the suffering of the sick. “One of the problems with drugs is the side effects,” he says. With cancer, if you give chemotherapy, you inject drugs into the blood and the chemotherapy will have effects all over the body. That’s why we’re going to see hair loss and other unwanted effects. If we were able to bring the chemotherapy to one place, we could only treat cancer cells and avoid side effects throughout the rest of the body. ”
The drugs developed by Tatum bioscience are in preclinical animal testing at this time. Patent applications have been filed; the company expects to bring its drugs to market in seven or eight years.