He designs proteins with moving parts - molecules that compute, switch, and make decisions inside living cells. Now he is using them to build T cells stubborn enough to cure the cancers everyone else gave up on.
In a solid tumor, engineered T cells tend to vanish in about a month. They arrive, they swing, they fade. For most of the cell-therapy field, that disappearing act is the wall. For Marc Lajoie, it is the assignment.
Lajoie is the co-founder and chief executive of Outpace Bio, a Seattle company that treats proteins the way a software architect treats code. The pitch is deceptively simple: the dramatic cures cell therapy delivers in certain blood cancers should be possible everywhere else, too. The roughly 95% of cancers that are solid tumors have simply refused to cooperate. Outpace exists to change their minds.
The method is unusual. Rather than hunting for one silver-bullet fix, Lajoie's team identified each separate reason CAR-T runs out of steam in solid tumors - the cells don't persist, don't survive the hostile tumor neighborhood, and get outflanked when the cancer drops the antigen they were trained to find - and designed a targeted intervention for each, then folded all of them into a single payload so the manufacturing stays simple. Smart cells, plain assembly line.
That blend of ambition and engineering discipline is the through-line of his career. He doesn't pick problems because they're winnable. He picks them because they're load-bearing.
If you think of cancer as a game of Whack-a-Mole, you can't just whack the first mole and win the game.- Marc Lajoie, to GeekWire
Cells vanish in roughly a month. Design them to stick around.
The tumor microenvironment is hostile. Build cells that endure it.
Cancer drops the target antigen. Give cells more ways to see it.
Add switches and logic so power doesn't become toxicity.
Proteins - not genomes - are the biological unit of function.- The thesis underneath Outpace Bio
Long before the CEO title, Lajoie was the graduate student doing something that sounds borrowed from science fiction. In George Church's lab at Harvard, he helped create the first genomically recoded organism - a living thing whose genetic code had been deliberately reassigned. It is the kind of result that gets you on a Forbes list at 22 and a reputation as someone who edits the rulebook rather than the margins.
Then he changed instruments. Joining David Baker's Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington in 2014, he and collaborator Scott Boyken pioneered the design of proteins with moving parts - molecules that don't just hold a shape but change it, latch, and respond. That work produced Co-LOCKR, a system of designed proteins that use logic to decide which cells to target based on the precise combination of markers on their surface. Molecular computers, the headlines called them. Lajoie just kept building.
Created the first genomically recoded organism with a reassigned genetic code, and co-founded GRO Biosciences out of the work.
Pioneered de novo proteins that switch and latch - and co-authored Co-LOCKR, designed protein logic for cell targeting.
Co-founded Outpace with Scott Boyken to turn protein design into cell therapies for solid tumors.
Dartmouth, BA biophysical chemistry →
Harvard, PhD chemical biology (Church) →
UW Institute for Protein Design (Baker) →
GRO Biosciences → Lyell → Outpace
Efficacy is still the fundamental problem that needs to be solved - efficacy and safety.
How do you take the kind of curative efficacy we see in certain blood cancers, and bring that to the other 95% of cancers?
We're pretty laser-focused on solving efficacy and safety, which we truly think are the two key barriers to curative T-cell therapies for cancer.
You need multiple technologies in place to be resilient to all the mechanisms a cancer can throw at you.
He helped build a living organism whose genetic code had been rewritten - once the stuff of textbooks-yet-to-come.
His proteins don't just fold. They move, switch, and run logic gates, behaving more like tiny machines than molecules.
Three biotech companies before the spotlight settled: GRO Biosciences, Lyell Immunopharma, Outpace Bio.
He likens today's cell therapy to monoclonal antibodies in the 1970s - narrow at first, then everywhere.
Outpace packs four separate enhancement technologies into one cell payload, so the science gets clever while the factory stays boring.
The collaborations run deep: Scott Boyken, Stan Riddell, David Baker - the same brilliant orbit, project after project.
The bet is that a cure for a few blood cancers is really a preview - and that designed proteins are how the rest of oncology catches up.- The Outpace aspiration, in plain terms