A biology problem that reads like a search problem.
Sanavia Oncology, the company Server Ertem founded in 2020 and has run as chief executive since February 2021, is doing something oncology companies usually treat as separate steps in the same sentence. It is looking for cancer-specific epitopes - small pieces of proteins on the surface of tumor cells that an antibody can bind - and it is trying to do this at the moment those epitopes appear in the patients who no longer respond to standard drugs. The pitch is not "new target." It is "same target, better piece of it, in the tumor that is currently escaping."
The platform is a stack, not a single machine. High-throughput sequencing sorts through tumor samples. Super-resolution microscopy, the single-molecule kind, maps where things sit on a cell. Three-dimensional protein modeling turns those coordinates into shapes an antibody can be designed against. Machine learning ranks candidates, then ranks the antibodies that come out the other side. The output is not a hypothesis; it is a shortlist of epitopes with a suggested modality attached - an antibody-drug conjugate here, a bispecific T-cell engager there, a CAR-T if the biology calls for it.
SANA-01, Sanavia's lead antibody-drug conjugate, is the first proof of concept. According to the company's own presentation, its target epitope shows up in a striking share of the tumors that draw the most attention: as much as three quarters of lung cancers, seven in ten triple-negative breast cancers, seven in ten ovarian cancers, three quarters of pancreatic cancers. It is the kind of number a founder does not put in a slide unless a lawyer has looked at it. Sanavia has put it in a slide.
Ertem's background makes the setup unsurprising. He did his PhD in oncology and cancer biology at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences between 2003 and 2009, then a postdoctoral fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for four years. Those two institutions sit on either side of York Avenue. Sanavia's office, at 430 East 29th Street inside the Alexandria Center for Life Science, is a short walk south. The New York cancer research corridor is a real place, and Ertem has spent most of his adult life on it.
The intermediate step between MSK and the CEO title was Cornell Tech. In 2019 he joined the Runway Startup Postdoc program at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, which pays scientists an equity-backed stipend to try to build a company instead of writing another paper. He stayed roughly a year and a half. Sanavia followed.