The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recently awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to three individuals for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry. Among them was Carolyn Bertozzi, a scientific advisor to Shasqi (San Francisco). The oncology company has developed a novel platform to localize and activate cancer ‘protodrugs’ at a tumor site.
In 2020, Shasqi dosed the first patient with SQ3370, a unique therapy that uses the company’s proprietary click-activated protodrugs against cancer (CAPAC) platform. SQ3370 is intended to activate the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin.
The core of the idea for Shasqi came when Shasqi’s founder and CEO, José M. Mejía Oneto, was in a research phase of an orthopedic surgery residency program at the University of California, Davis. Having earned a chemistry Ph.D., Mejía pondered if there was a better way to deliver a drug to a target site in the body. “The thing that bothered me was that only about 1% o…