Outsmarting Resistance with Rhythm

I'm Daniel Levine, and this is the Bio Report. Pancreatic cancer remains one of oncology's deadliest diagnoses with standard treatments often offering only transient tumor shrinkage at the cost of grueling side effects and rapid resistance. Amineering is using transcriptomatic and informatics tools to design a MEK inhibitor dosed in intense daily pulses rather than continuously. This approach aims to restore more normal signaling rhythm in healthy cells while repeatedly ambushing tumors. Ben Zeskin, CEO of immuneeering, discusses how the company is using its informatics driven dosing regimen to reengineer targeted cancer therapy so it extends survival, delays resistance, and is better tolerated. Ben, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Daniel. It's a pleasure. We're gonna talk about pancreatic cancer, Immuniering's novel dosing design, and its efforts to develop a treatment for this and other cancers using this approach. Let's start with the challenges of resistance and toxicity with targeted therapies today. Can you explain the problem? Yeah. Absolutely. So our goal is to keep patients alive and to enhance their quality of life. And the two things that you that you mentioned really, get in the way of that with traditional targeted therapies. And if if you look at how, cancer therapies have have traditionally been developed, they're developed to shrink tumors quickly, but it's not necessarily a durable effect. And that's why you see patients, you know, why are patients still dying of cancer in 2026? You know, there's a lot of treatments that can shrink tumors but the effects aren't durable, resistance develops, and the treatments are not generally well tolerated, there's generally a lot of fairly harsh side effects, I think we've all been conditioned to just kind of expect that cancer therapy is gonna be grueling, and it doesn't have to be that way. When it's a design goal from the start, you can make a drug that helps keep cancer patients alive and is really well tolerated and in fact can enhance the patient's quality of life. And so those are really the, you know those those were our goals from the start. From the time we started this company you know we focused on overall survival, understanding the patients who were having long overall survival on existing cancer therapies so we could figure out how to make that happen in in more people. And that that led us to focus on these you know fairly unusual priorities, how do you counteract resistance, right? How do you prevent the tumor from adapting and getting around your therapy? How do you improve the tolerability? And then other priorities, how do you prevent kind of the muscle wasting that causes causes patients to to lose weight? So we we just kinda have this different set of priorities from the start that we're all focused around this goal of of keeping patients alive and really helping them thrive. Those goals led you to what's known as deep cyclic inhibition. In in lay terms, what is …