Adam Freund, Founder and CEO
January 25, 2022
Our approach starts by using single-cell data to identify pathogenic cells and specific markers to target them. We then design therapies to eliminate these - and only these - cells. We are initially focused on treating chronic diseases, with the long-term goal of extending healthy lifespan.
Arda is a seed-stage biotech located in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are backed by Andreessen Horowitz, GV, The Longevity Fund, Village Global, Axial, NJF and others.
Cells are the functional units of life, but they are also the functional units of disease. Many diseases are caused by certain cell populations becoming too abundant or active; for example, the overgrowth of stromal cell types contributes to fibrosis, while the excessive activation of particular immune cells leads to chronic inflammation. Arda’s hypothesis is that removing these cells will delay or reverse disease progression.
The idea of eliminating - or “targeting” - bad cells is not new; most cancer treatments are based on this strategy. Yet when it comes to other diseases, rather than removing harmful cells, most therapeutics modulate the activity of individual proteins with the goal of modifying cell behavior. However, cell behavior is a consequence of complex regulatory networks: multiple pathways contribute, often with redundancy, making cell behavior difficult to change via single targets. We believe that in many cases the better strategy is to eliminate the entire pathogenic network — that is, the entire cell.
If this therapeutic strategy already exists, why aren’t there more drugs that use it? In short, two roadblocks have hampered the development of this class of therapeutics: 1) a lack of detailed cellular catalogs for most diseases and 2) a lack of easily programmable therapeutic tools to eliminate specific cells.
You can read more about these obstacles below and how recent technological advances have alleviated the challenges they pose, making this the ideal time for cell-targeting therapy development.
For as long as I have been a scientist, I have been driven to understand aging. Frankly, I have trouble understanding why it’s not a more common obsession. After all, it’s going to kill you.
As we age, our health deteriorates in a myriad of ways, a natural version of lingchi, the **torment of a thousand cuts. It could be that each of these cuts is an independent event, unconnected from the others except by a shared timeline. However, it is likely that at least some of these cuts are made by the same knife, in which case blocking the knife is a far better strategy than applying a thousand bandages. In other words, at Arda, we [hypothesize](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405471219300390#:~:text=Untangling Aging Using Dynamic%2C Organism-Level Phenotypic Networks,-Author links open&text=Use automated phenotyping technologies to,to enrich for health relevance.) that there are shared biological mechanisms that affect multiple aspects of age-related deterioration, and that targeting those mechanisms is a promising path to extending healthy lifespan. More specifically, we suspect that many aspects of aging are driven by the hyper-activation of particular cell types, and that if we can remove those cells, we will delay (and possibly reverse) tissue deterioration. If we are even marginally successful, we will push back the greatest killer that has ever existed, improve quality of life at older ages, and give everyone more time with the people they love. We strive to not just add years to life, but life to years.
In the last several years, a number of biotech startups have formed to remove senescent cells in a variety of indications. Cellular senescence is a cell state triggered by damage or stress and is characterized by growth arrest and a pro-inflammatory secretory phenotype. Senolytic companies arise from the thesis that removing senescent cells will lead to clinical benefit. Although there are conceptual overlaps between this approach and Arda’s, and we owe a debt to senolytic companies and academic labs for demonstrating key concepts, we believe senescent cells are just one example of a pathogenic cell state, with many more waiting to be discovered and targeted. Further, we believe that Arda’s strategy of using single cell patient data to drive target selection has higher odds of clinical translation than target selection based on the senescence disease hypothesis.
