Forty Years
in the Making.

Some of the most important things at BioFund look nothing like announcements when they happen. They look like two scientists on a call, agreeing that something is worth trying. This September, one of those calls became a program.

We have started BioFund's Cell Therapy Development Program. Its founding program is called BF-CT01, and it brings together MOL608 and natural killer cells. I want to say a little about what that means. Mostly, though, I want to write about where it came from, because that is the part I find most moving.

Twenty years in Szeged.

Róbert Katona — Robi, to everyone who works with him — has spent more than twenty years engineering cell lines. It is exacting, unglamorous work: persuading living cells to be stable, reproducible, and willing to do what you need of them, week after week, year after year. Very little of it ever makes a headline. All of it is load-bearing.

MOL608 exists because of that work. The cell engineering came first, and the molecule was made possible by it. That is the part of the story that is easiest to skip, and I would like us never to skip it.

Today BioFund holds more than eleven engineered cell lines, including caninized lines built for our animal health work. Each one is a small monument to patience.

Twenty years in Guelph.

Jim Petrik has spent more than twenty years studying the tumor microenvironment — the neighborhood a tumor builds around itself. The blood vessels it recruits, the signals it sends, the ways it persuades the body's defenses to stand down. If the cancer cell is the house, the microenvironment is the street, the gate, and the guard dog.

It is also where many promising therapies quietly fail. They reach the tumor and find the door locked from the inside.

Once MOL608 existed, Jim was the person who could take it into preclinical studies and ask it the hard questions. He has been doing exactly that, as a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair — and, in whatever hours remain, as a volunteer fire chief. At the Ontario Veterinary College, six to eight thousand animal cancer patients walk through the doors every year. That is where One Problem stops being a paper and becomes a waiting room.

Why natural killer cells.

Natural killer cells are among the body's first responders. Unlike the T cells that most cell therapies have been built on, they need no prior training to recognize a stressed or abnormal cell and destroy it. In principle, they can also be given more safely from one person to another, which matters enormously if a therapy is ever to become affordable rather than bespoke.

Their weakness is precisely the terrain Jim has spent his career mapping. Tumors are very good at switching them off.

BF-CT01 asks what happens when those cells and MOL608 work together. It is a question you can only ask properly if both halves live in the same family: the craft to make and hold the cells, and a deep understanding of the ground they have to cross. We do not know the answer yet. Finding it is the work of the next seven years.

A story about collaboration.

When I describe BF-CT01 to people, I find myself talking less about cells and more about people. Two scientists, in two countries, each spent two decades on questions much of the field considered specialist. Neither was working toward this program. Neither could have built it alone. Forty years of work, done separately, turned out to fit together.

Nobody designed this program from the top. Two careers made it possible, and a family was patient enough to notice.

In my last note I wrote that a published result is easy to read, and that twenty years of craft behind it is much harder to reproduce. This is what I meant. You can publish a protocol. You cannot publish Robi's hands, or Jim's instinct for what a tumor will do next.

It is also why the conversations Neeki has opened in California now have somewhere concrete to go. A researcher at UCLA or USC who wants to test an idea about immune cells and the tumor microenvironment no longer has to be asked to imagine what BioFund might become. They can be shown what it already is.

Built for the long clock.

Cell therapy is slow. Cells have to be made, banked, tested, and made again. Each step takes months, and some of the most valuable results are the ones that send you back to the beginning.

A fund with a ten-year life would ask when this becomes a company. We ask something simpler: will this be further along in seven years than it is today? That is the only question the long clock needs answered, and it is one we can afford to keep asking for three cycles in a row.

This is exactly the kind of work BioFund was built to carry — and exactly the kind that gets abandoned elsewhere the moment money grows nervous.

For Ron.

This note is written for the LUA Focus Summit, which carries Ron's legacy, and it feels right that it does.

Ron never let anything slide. He would have read this, smiled, and found the one question nobody else in the room was willing to ask. I suspect it would have been about time — how much of it this will take, and whether we have the nerve for it. He taught us the answer himself: most impossible things are a matter of time and nerve. We have the time. We are working on the nerve.

“You guys make sure to cure cancer.”Ron Sege, 1957 – 2025

Forty years in the making. Twenty-one more on the clock. We're on it.