Laura Towart, CEO Vivan Therapeutics

Laura Towart, CEO

Vivan Therapeutics: On the cutting edge of personalized cancer medicine

It’s not every day you think about how to use fruit flies to improve treatments and outcomes for cancer patients. That is, if you’re not Vivan Therapeutics founder Laura Towart.

A neuroscientist by training with a passion for personalized medicine, Laura began building Vivan (formerly known as My Personal Therapeutics) over a decade ago, when she was contacted by Mount Sinai Hospital in New York about an exciting, new technology under development.

Fast forward to 2023, and that technology, licensed in partnership with Mount Sinai, has evolved into a first-of-a-kind enterprise at the cutting edge of personalized cancer treatment — based in part on fruit flies.

After running a patient’s tumor biopsies and blood samples through a proprietary engine to read the unique mutations driving that patient’s cancer, Vivan engineers those mutations into fruit flies for further study as patient avatars.

“We’re the only company that does that. It’s a patented methodology of creating complex, human-like tumors in the flies in a tissue-specific way,” Laura says from London, where the company is based.

Since Vivan works with fruit flies, the company can screen up to half a million animals per patient, enabling it to test a wide variety of drugs and drug combinations.

“Our guiding principle is unbiased drug screening. We don’t presume to know what therapies will work, so we test them all. There’s not any other animal models or systems that can do this,” Laura explains. “And so we identify novel combinations of, usually, cancer drugs and non-cancer drugs. That means treatment is overall less toxic, and generally more affordable.”

Building on those innovations, Vivan has expanded into the drug discovery process as well.

“We do drug discovery and drug development, alone and through partnerships, and we have novel drug combinations that are more effective than the standard of care that we have identified and patented,” Laura says.

The company’s latest innovation is a new technology called TuMatch that leverages artificial intelligence to predict treatment options based on previous drug screening and other data sets. TuMatch is already available now for colorectal cancer patients, and preparations are already underway for a multi-center European clinical validation study.

We have a large, proprietary dataset based on all the tumor mutational profiles, and so we built an AI and machine learning model that helps us determine the best treatment pathway rapidly,” Laura explains.

She adds: “Up until the point we had TuMatch, the Personal Discovery Process — that’s the fly-based process — took too long for many patients and was labor intensive. TuMatch enables us to work with a lot more patients.”

That’s where Vivan’s Armenia team comes in.

Two years ago, Granatus Ventures invested in the company in a seed round and connected Laura, who was looking for good data scientists at the time, with the Armenian Bioinformatics Institute in Yerevan. From there, a partnership was born.

“We are very pleased with the team we have built in Armenia and we have been able to seamlessly integrate them with the team in London,” Laura says, adding that Vivan is now looking to hire more data scientists to join the team.

Beyond TuMatch, the company is also set to announce a deal with the prestigious Institute for Cancer Research in London to work on a new class of novel cancer drugs.

“We’ve all experienced cancer in our families and our friends, and we know that it’s a very difficult time,” Laura says. “And so what we try to do is create ease and allow people to relax while we identify the best therapy.”