As a grad student in biological engineering at MIT, Jake Becraft had an idea that could change the way we treat cancer: What if genes could be turned on and off like light switches? Thinking it through a bit further, he envisioned “circuits” in which messenger RNA (mRNA), which carries the instructions for making proteins to cells, could be programmed to cause cancerous tumors to reveal themselves to the body’s immune system.
It was an idea at the cutting-edge of science, and when Becraft cofounded Cambridge, Mass.-based Strand Therapeutics to pursue it there was no guarantee of success. Now, eight years later, Strand seems on the cusp of it. Strand’s preliminary phase 1 clinical trial showed that its first programmable mRNA drug is not only safe, but can shrink tumors in cancer patients who had otherwise run out of treatment options.
“It shocked even us,” Becraft told Forbes. “You hope something happens, but you don’t expect to see a huge response because these patients have already proven to have cancers so resistant to treatment.”
With those results, Strand Therapeutics raised $153 million in new venture funding led by Swedish investment giant Kinnevik to build out its programmable mRNA therapeutics pipeline. Other investors include VC firms Iconiq and Playground Global; Regeneron Ventures, the venture arm of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals; and drugmakers Amgen and Eli Lilly.
The investment brings Strand’s total funding to $250 million and its valuation to an estimated $550 million. That number pales in comparison to the stratospheric valuations of today’s AI startups, but it’s a significant one for a clinical-stage biotech that was worth $359 million at its last round, in November 2024, according to venture-capital database PitchBook. The funding comes at a time when biotech firms have been struggling to raise money and the public markets are filled with zombie biotechs that are trading below their cash on hand. Strand, which hopes to get its first therapy on the market by 2030, does not yet have revenue.
Most people know mRNA as the backbone of the vaccines from Moderna and BioNTech during the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite their success, those vaccines have become a political football, with Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announcing on Tuesday that he was pulling $500 million of federal funding from mRNA vaccine projects. But mRNA could potentially be used to treat a variety of diseases, from cancer to heart disease. Unlike Covid-19 vaccines, which send instructions to a cell’s nucleus to create antigens for a virus, Strand’s mRNA therapeutics instruct tumors to produce signals that make them visible to the body’s immune system—essentially lighting them up–so that it can fight back.
“The clinical results blew us away,” said Ala Alenazi, an investment manager at Kinnevik, who will join Strand’s board of directors with the deal. “They have been able to prove out these ambitions that had stayed in textbooks.”
Becraft, who is now 34, calls himself “a reluctant biotech executive.” In 2017, he and Tasuku Kitada, the company’s president and head of research and development—the first scientist to create synthetic mRNA gene circuits while working as a researcher at MIT—spun Strand out of MIT. Becraft’s Ph.D. advisor, Ron Weiss, a professor of biological engineering whose work focuses on engineering cells and building circuits, was also a cofounder and remains an advisor to the company. In 2019, Strand scored seed funding with Playground leading the round. Its valuation then was just $15.5 million, according to venture-capital database PitchBook. “They were young Ph.D.s with amazing ideas when we first met with them,” said Jory Bell, a general partner at Playground Global.
Becraft has long believed that the biggest barrier to new and personalized medicines is delivery. Today, many therapies are administered by “brute forcing the proteins into the right cells,” requiring lengthy hospital stays for patients and high costs for insurers, he said. “What we want to do is deliver proteins that have a therapeutic outcome into a cancer cell or immune cell or into the bone marrow,” he said. That targeting allows the treatment to be potent where it’s needed without being toxic where it isn’t.
“What’s become very clear in the past year or year-and-a-half is that the age of messenger RNA and genetic medicines is finally here,” he said. “We see that as the path to how we will build medicines in the future.”
Consider the first protein that Strand is working with, an immune system stimulant called interleukin 12, or IL-12. It’s promising as a cancer immunotherapy, but so far its toxicity has outweighed any anti-cancer benefits. Without targeting, “it is ineffective or toxic,” Becraft said. “You want effective and non-toxic.”
The results of Strand’s study of 22 cancer patients showed it was possible to use targeting to create a potent therapy that wasn’t toxic, he said. “From the very first patients we dosed, we started to see the tumors shrinking,” he said.
Referring to a contrast dye scan of a patient with stage 4 melanoma, Becraft noted tumors, indicated with black dots, across the body. A second scan of the same patient after treatment with Strand’s mRNA drug revealed a stunning improvement. “The only dot left was where the contrast agent was injected in their arm,” Becraft said. “I don’t think anyone expects that. This was very shocking.”
But even with results like this, it’s a long road from early clinical trials to commercialization. Strand now plans to use its new influx of funds to conduct additional clinical research with the hopes of getting its first drug approved by 2030. The company also has a few other pre-clinical mRNA therapies in its pipeline, including one that gets infused through a patient’s bloodstream rather than injected into a tumor. That would allow it to potentially be used for additional types of cancer that are harder to reach, such as lung cancer.
“We can rewire the way we treat cancer,” Becraft said. “We think we are just on the precipice of what this technology can do.”
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