The story behind Dispatch Biotherapeutics, an immunotherapy start-up with Penn roots

When Jeff Marrazzo announced his departure from Philadelphia gene-therapy trailblazer Spark Therapeutics Inc. in 2022, he said he wanted to expand his focus and build more than one company at a time.

The first of the companies he’s worked on debuted publicly last week, with the ambitious goal of developing a universal treatment option for solid tumors, such as lung and colon cancer.

Marrazzo is board chair of Dispatch Biotherapeutics, a cancer immunotherapy start-up pursuing a new way to target hard-to-treat solid tumors by painting a target on cancer cells. The company grew out of research in the lab of CAR-T therapy pioneer Carl June at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dispatch was founded in 2022, but has operated in stealth mode until now. Seventy-five percent of its 60 employees work in Philadelphia. The remainder are in San Francisco.

Marrazzo, who cofounded Spark in 2013, said a condition of his involvement in Dispatch was that it be based largely in Philadelphia.

“It was founded here, and it’s going to grow here,” Marrazzo said in an interview.

Investors have poured $216 million into Dispatch, led by Arch Venture Partners and Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sean Parker. The University of Pennsylvania is also among Dispatch’s investors.

The seed for what became Dispatch was planted in 2020, when one of Dispatch’s founders, Lex Johnson, was working in June’s lab at Penn.

Johnson had completed his doctorate in immunology at Penn under the guidance of June and Andy Minn, a former Penn cancer researcher who is starting at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York on Aug. 1.

Johnson recalled many conversations with June and Minn about how to take the work he was doing at Penn and spin it out into a company. “That was only a small piece of what Dispatch now is,” Johnson said.

Sean Parker, an investor and philanthropist with close ties to June, had the idea to combine the work at Penn with approaches under development at Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco, into what became Dispatch, Johnson said.

In addition to Minn and June at Penn, Chris Garcia at Stanford and Kole Roybal at UCSF are listed as Dispatch’s scientific cofounders.

Success is hardly guaranteed. It typically takes years for companies like Dispatch to advance through clinical trials to see if the products work in humans and are safe. Sometimes, when they reach the marketplace, they are extraordinarily expensive.

A couple years after Marrazzo left Spark, its owner, Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, put the company through a major restructuring, including the layoff of 377 people, more than half its workforce. Spark’s history is an example of the volatile nature of the biotech sector.

Scientists, including June, have made great strides in using the body’s immune system to attack and destroy blood cancers, such as certain forms of leukemia and lymphoma.

Solid tumors are much harder to treat because the immune system can’t distinguish between targets in the tumor and targets in healthy tissue, Johnson said. Another problem is that malignant tumors create an environment that is hostile to the immune cells that are supposed to attack it.

Many companies trying to use the immune system to eliminate cancerous tumors look for a specific target in the tumor for the immune cells.

Another Philadelphia company June was involved in, Tmunity Therapeutics, halted a Phase 1 prostate cancer trial after two patients died from a form of neurotoxicity. The problem was that target in the prostate cancer was also present in other healthy parts of the body.

Dispatch’s strategy is to turn the problem on its head by using a virus to attach what it calls a “flare” onto the cells it wants the immune system to attack.

“The flare is designed to deliver a target that is not present in any other part of the body,” Johnson said.

The virus that attaches the flare is also designed to stimulate the immune system so it can withstand the tumor’s hostile environment.

Sabah Oney, Dispatch’s CEO, said the company will present more details about its approach at a scientific conference later this year. Dispatch hopes to start a Phase 1 clinical trail next year, Oney said, but he declined to say what type of cancer would be targeted in the first patients.

Generally, he said, the company is focused on cancers with large unmet need, such as colorectal and lung cancers.