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San Diego's newest biotech has cash and a veteran team. But it's missing one thing: a CEO

San Diego Union-Tribune - 10/25/2021

Sorrento Mesa biotech Radionetics Oncology recently launched in a bid to blast tumors with radiation while sparing healthy cells. But while the company has $30 million, an experienced leadership team and 10 candidate drugs, it's missing one thing.

A CEO.

Scott Struthers is betting that'll change soon. He's chair of the company's board and co-founder and CEO of Crinetics, a local biotech developing drugs against cancers and diseases of the endocrine system, the parts of the body that make hormones regulating everything from mood and appetite to fertility and blood pressure.

Radionetics spun out of Crinetics on Oct. 18 to tackle a different problem: making cancer radiation more precise. While the current standard, external radiation, can shrink or destroy tumors with beams of concentrated energy, such as X-rays and gamma rays, these beams pass through skin and other healthy tissue before reaching cancer cells. That can lead to a range of side effects, from exhaustion to hair loss to flaky, irritated skin over the treatment area.

The new biotech aims to avoid these effects while reaping radiation's benefits. Their plan is to give patients intravenous infusions of radioactive compounds hitched to molecules that only latch onto cancer cells. It's an approach that's already proven promising in a few tumor types, including prostate cancer, but Struthers thinks that's just the beginning.

"There's 100 other ways to do this for almost any other type of tumor. And so the role of Radionetics is to expand those types of tumors that can be treated with this new approach to therapy," Struthers said. "This is really a 'go big or go home' strategy."

The firm is targeting everything from lung cancer to kidney cancer to cancers of the intestines and ovaries, among other examples. The company's 10 candidate drugs are radioactive compounds linked to small molecules that latch onto proteins found on the surfaces of cancer cells but largely absent on healthy cells. You can think of these small molecules a bit like cab drivers by shuttling their passengers (the radioactive compound) to their destination (the tumor). Struthers expects at least one of these drugs to enter clinical trials by 2022.

Radionetics isn't the only firm pursuing this strategy, in part because the market for so-called radiopharmaceuticals could reach $12.6 billion by 2027. But Struthers says other companies are hitching their radioactive compounds to antibodies or short bits of protein known as peptides, and that these drugs are harder to manufacture or risk getting broken down in the body. The chemistry behind making small molecules, he adds, is much more straightforward.

"This is the most exciting thing I've done in a long time," Struthers said. "It is literally keeping me up at night."

He's been a fixture in the local life science community for decades. He first arrived in the region in 1979 to attend UC San Diego as an undergraduate and later earned his doctorate at the Salk Institute, where he studied the chemistry behind hormones. That training prepared him for a 10-year stint at local firm Neurocrine Biosciences, where he was director of endocrinology and metabolism research.

At Neurocrine, Struthers worked alongside Yun-Fei (Frank) Zhu, Ana Kusnetzow and Stephen Betz. The four of them founded Crinetics in 2008 and are all involved in Radionetics. Zhu will serve as the biotech's chief research officer and Kusnetzow as vice president of biology. Betz will sit on the scientific advisory board of the company.

Radionetics is actively searching for a CEO with a track record of growing oncology-focused biotechs. That shouldn't be an issue in San Diego's booming life science industry, where serial entrepreneurs rapidly expand companies before jumping into their next venture.

Funding for Radionetics comes from 5AMVentures and Frazier Healthcare Partners, venture capital firms that have bankrolled a number of local companies, from Ambrx to Escient Pharmaceuticals to Cirius Therapeutics.

This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune.

©2021 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Visit sandiegouniontribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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