ALEXANDRE MONIZ BARBOSA
Aisha de Sequeira had a lot more to contribute to Goa, India and the world before cancer claimed her. A leading investment banker, co-head of Morgan Stanley India, at 50 when she died, the road ahead for her was filled with possibilities. Though she was not able to win the battle against cancer, her bereaved husband, Roy de Souza, a technology professional, decided to take up the challenge to fight the disease and protect families from what he and his three young boys went through.
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“Five and a half years ago I lost my wife to cancer. The doctor said, ‘We can’t cure-only prolong.’ I was
left to raise my children alone. I couldn’t accept that,” Roy de Souza said in a video conference with O Heraldo.
And so, when Aisha was still alive, Roy started BreakBio, a biotech company with headquarters at Florida, USA, dedicated to advancing innovative solutions in vaccine development for the treatment of cancer, What he aspired to was develop therapies that would be personalised to each patient and what he did was create a software to analyse the cancer cells of different patients.
“I sold my tech company to a Fortune 500 and founded BreakBio, investing my own capital. I recruited top cancer scientists, then built an Al platform that designs drugs for each patient, which are then manufactured for them,” he said.
He explained that cancer evolves rapidly within each patient then spawns many cell types, making one drug
ineffective at killing everything so the breakthrough needed isn’t another single drug but Al that designs and manufactures the right drugs for each patient.
Balancing family with business, Roy is succeeding in both. “My kids are thriving despite the loss of their mother and BreakBio is leading a medical revolution,” he said. “Big pharma would pay billions to buy it (BreakBio) when the success we saw in first patients treated is confirmed in a randomised trial,” he added, as the company gears up for the trial stage.
O HERALDO: It obviously was Aisha’s sickness that led you into cancer research. What was the defining moment for this move?
ROY DE SOUZA: When Aisha had cancer I started learning about it. I asked, how come they can’t cure it? How is it possible they can’t cure cancer? There must be a way to cure and that’s why I started learning about cancer. I feel there are ways to cure but they’re different and they need a lot of technology and analysis of the cancer and we need to build that for the patient. So that’s what I’m doing and we’re very close now to a trial.
We map each patient’s cancer with mass spec, train Al to find approximately 38 targets (including non-mutated) and rapidly manufacture their personalised drugs. We use Al to analyse cancer cells. This is a very interesting story and I had not thought of what you said, but as you said people are aware of what happened to Aisha, sadly, and would be interested in what’s coming out of it. The fact that the trial is now going to start is most exciting, says Roy De Souza
O HERALDO: What exactly are you doing? I understand that you are looking at each patient individually?
ROY DE SOUZA: It’s kind of a personalised work of analysing the cancer cells. We analyse them in each patient because each patient is different. The challenge with cancer is one thing goes wrong which makes it grow fast and then one or two days later one cell becomes two and maybe five days later two cells become four. So the rate of growth is very fast. A year later you can have hundred generations of evolution and this creates lots of families of cancer cells that are all different. One family may be the biggest and you create a drug that kills that group of cancer cells but there’s another thousand families and one of them may take over and grow. That’s how cancer works. You get one treatment it doesn’t work anymore. Chemo is no longer working, so you get the next treatment. It doesn’t work anymore because you’ve killed those cells. So what we do is to try and analyse all the cancer cells, all the different types and manufacture approximately 38 drugs for each patient so that for each patient we can kill all of the cancer cells simultaneously. The drugs are an immunotherapy, T-cell related. In immunotherapy we don’t create a chemical, a molecule, we basically get the body to create T-cells, so some people call it a vaccine we don’t call it a vaccine we call it immunotherapy.
O HERALDO: Does that make it a vaccine or a treatment?
ROY DE SOUZA: It’s a drug, it’s not a preventative, it doesn’t prevent something. It just treats the problem. Scientists sometimes call this a vaccine even though it’s a treatment. It doesn’t prevent cancer, it treats people with cancer but technically, if you inject something into-the arm which stimulates the immune system it is called a vaccine, doesn’t matter if it prevents or treats, but 99 percent of the time a vaccine is to prevent but in cancer a vaccine can be used to treat.
O HERALDO: You are ready for trials?
ROY DE SOUZA: We’re ready at the trial stage. The trial is going to be done in Miami, at the Miami Cancer Institute. It’s fully funded. It’s going to be a randomised trial. Some patients get it, some don’t. So it could be a pretty good trial.
O HERALDO: When are you likely to start the trials? Have you got the licenses?
ROY DE SOUZA: We have just got some of the licenses and we’re doing all the paperwork right now. The main thing is getting the FDA to approve what’s called an investigational new drug, wherein you’re allowed to inject the drug into humans. So we’ve got that and that’s the most difficult part. Then you have to agree to the treatment protocol.
O HERALDO: Are you the only one doing this or are there other companies looking at similar kinds of treatment?
ROY DE SOUZA: There are other companies which is important for it shows that it’s real, it’s not a crazy idea. Two companies-Moderna and BioNTech-are both doing trials. Moderna has had a successful small trial in melanoma and they prevented the cancer coming back, but anyway Moderna has a trial which is very good news.
O HERALDO: Are you looking only at a specific cancer?
ROY DE SOUZA: The first trial we’re doing is triple negative breast cancer but this should work for any cancer because we’re analysing the cancer cells seeing what’s wrong and making the drug so it doesn’t matter what cancer it is it should still work.
O HERALDO: Since you were a technology professional how was it to shift into cancer research?
ROY DE SOUZA: I think it’s a good thing I shifted because I enjoy what I do and I find it very fulfilling, I find it a good thing to spend my life doing this. Initially it was difficult as you can imagine because I don’t know medicine and I had to learn, to read the textbooks and initially I didn’t want to read the textbooks because they don’t look like fun and I had to go to classes. My cousin, who’s also born in Goa, Tim Cardozo, a professor at NYU Langone, teaches this so I went to some of his classes but what I found is that once you start learning it you realise it is interesting and then you continue learning so then it becomes easier.
O HERALDO: What were your thoughts and feelings when you got into this research? What really made you think that you could look into cancer and find a cure for it?
ROY DE SOUZA: I think I’m optimistic. I see problems I want to solve them. Different people have different personalities I wanted to solve this problem and I also believed it could be solved. I’m the kind of personality who believes things are possible. People say it’s not possible. I don’t believe that. First you try and it’s a challenge and also Aisha was not in good shape, Aisha was going to die, so there was a very strong motivation to find a solution.
I think in the future personalised oncology will be used for the difficult cancers because there’s no other way (to treat it). I think over time people will say why do I need such complex, toxic chemo? I want something more targeted something that finds the right thing and kills it. I think over time it will be used more widely and people will add it to chemo. They’ll do chemo because that’s what they know but they won’t do so much chemo they’ll do a low dose chemo and they’ll add the vaccine and it’ll work well together. I think that’s what will happen – Roy de Souza
O HERALDO: How did she support you in this?
ROY DE SOUZA: Aisha was very supportive of what I was doing and she didn’t like to talk about it too much because she didn’t want to think too much about cancer but she was very supportive of it.
O HERALDO: What has been the hardest moments in this journey?
ROY DE SOUZA: I see everything as a step. You do one thing and then you do the next step so I’m not sure which are the hardest moments. The biggest thing was to get the FDA to approve our investigation of the new drug so that we could inject it into humans. FDA doesn’t easily approve things like that so I think that was probably the most difficult.
O HERALDO: If you are successful in these trials how quickly can this therapy or vaccine reach patients?
ROY DE SOUZA: Quickly, it is not very slow. We’ll get it down relatively quickly. We’re doing difficult cancers and if you can show it works with difficult cancers then you can show it works with all the easy cancers so by doing the difficult cancers first, it gets to the patients much more quickly.
O HERALDO: Where do you see personalised oncology a few years from now?
ROY DE SOUZA: I think in the future personalised oncology will be used for the difficult cancers because there’s no other way (to treat it). I think over time people will say why do I need such complex, toxic chemo? I want something more targeted something that finds the right thing and kills it. I think over time it will be used more widely and people will add it to chemo. They’ll do chemo because that’s what they know but they won’t do so much chemo they’ll do a low dose chemo and they’ll add the vaccine and it’ll work well together. I think that’s what will happen.
O HERALDO: How effective would this be for patients?
ROY DE SOUZA: It should be much more effective than chemo because chemo is very broad. We combine everything we do this plus ever less chemo.
