personalized-cancer-vaccine
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Moderna Designed Its COVID Vaccine in Two Days. The Hard Part Took Ten Years.
The Cambridge biotech turned messenger RNA from a lab curiosity into a platform for printing medicines from genetic code - vaccines, cancer shots, and rare-disease drugs that share one factory and swap out the instructions.
Niranjan Sardesai
Niranjan Sardesai is the founder, president and CEO of Geneos Therapeutics, a Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania biotech building personalized DNA-based cancer vaccines that are custom-designed to each patient's own tumor mutations. A Caltech-trained chemist with a Wharton MBA, he spent years as COO helping build Inovio Pharmaceuticals into a Phase III immunotherapy company before spinning out Geneos in 2016. Under his leadership Geneos published a landmark Nature Medicine paper in 2024 showing its neoantigen vaccine drove complete responses in advanced liver cancer, with some patients reaching multi-year, recurrence-free survival.
Geneos Therapeutics
Geneos Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotherapeutics company in Plymouth Meeting / Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, building DNA-based personalized immunotherapies for cancer. Its proprietary GT-EPIC platform reads a patient's own tumor mutations and manufactures a custom DNA plasmid vaccine encoding up to 40 of that patient's unique neoantigens, delivered intradermally with an IL-12 cytokine adjuvant and electroporation. In 2024 the company published Phase 1/2 GT-30 data in Nature Medicine showing its vaccine plus pembrolizumab generated new neoantigen-specific T cells and clinical responses in advanced liver cancer - billed as the first definitive demonstration of a personalized cancer vaccine boosting response to anti-PD-1 therapy.