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January 19, 2025
How often have you googled the symptoms and landed to the conclusion that you may have cancer? We dismiss this ‘warning’ from google as a joke. But several studies have confirmed that few underlying symptoms may lead to mortal disease. The most common of this being stomach cancer. The biggest reason behind this ignorance is the symptoms mostly resemble the most common gastrointestinal (GI) disorder. A study hints that due to huge unmet medical needs of GI cancers that annually afflicts over 3 million worldwide.
The Healthcare and Pharma industry is working tirelessly to find a cure for several life-threatening rare diseases. This development and evolution of immunotherapy, especially for treating advanced incurable cancers motivated Dr. John Luk to establish Arbele—a biotech and biopharmaceutical company that aims to develop more effective treatments for GI cancers. It has created proprietary discovery platforms to accelerate the development of multifunctional “first-in-class” immunotherapeutics. Acknowledging the scarcity on a global level, the company set out to expand in the US, Australia, and China to cope with the global unmet need for GI cancers. Furthermore, multicenter clinical trials are needed in different regions, followed by regulatory approval and marketing, etc. Over the past five years, the company has successfully filed multiple patent families on cancer target, drug molecules, and molecular diagnostics and Arbele’s first drug candidate will enter into clinical trial in 2021 to treat advanced gastrointestinal (GI) cancers.
Arbele’s goal has been to rapidly generate more effective, combined treatments for gastrointestinal cancers, including stomach, pancreas, colon, bile duct, and liver—which are currently the high-mortality cancers with limited treatment options. The team moved a step closer to their goal with the life-saving solution—Novel Cancer marker, Cadherin-17 (CDH17), aka CA-17.
CDH17 is identified and patented by Dr. John Luk at the University of Hong Kong. This CDH17 is tested positive (from 50-95%) in a wide range of GI cancers including colorectal, stomach, pancreas, bile duct, esophagus, and liver.
With the wide-ranging positive ratio, Arbele will be utilizing the CDH17 marker to develop three major product lines:
Molecular diagnostics to detect and screen at-risk patients earlier for better prevention and effective treatments
CAR-T/NK Cell Therapy: Directing host immune cells to survey and target tumor sites with high efficacy and reduced side effects
Bi-specific antibody: ARB202 is our first line of product targeting GI tumors with CDH17 marker while engaging CD3-T cells to kill cancer cells directly at tumor sites.
Start-ups have always struggled with several issues, and one of the prominent being finance. Arbele also struggles to gather funds and resources to advance the projects. As a Hong Kong-based start-up, where already the biotech ecosystem for early start-up remains sterile and lacks professional VCs to share risks, the challenges seemed rigid.
However, Arbele was aided with support from individual shareholders. For the past five years, intimate support of these individual shareholders from families and friends at workplaces and churches, managed to secure about $2-3M. The R&D activities were supported through the secured public funds (non-diluted) of about $5M. Recently, the team of Arbele won the BRACE Investment Fund from the AFCR (Asian Funds for Cancer Research).
The funds have contributed immensely to support Arbele’s research and study. The team is now closer to defeat cancer with novel immunotherapeutics. Arbele follows the three philosophies of Breakthrough innovation, Health Enhancement, Social Impact. With the important discovery of CDH17, the team has achieved breakthrough innovation, while the health enhancement will be a witness when the molecules enter into clinical stages. Dr. John is looking forward to bring Arbele’s effective therapies to benefit societies—regardless of race and wealth across different continents.
Cancer has been a life-threatening disease for ages. Only a few fortunate can afford the treatment and still, the full recovery is never guaranteed. Arbele’s product poses a ray of hope for the financially challenged population too, in particular for the patients in Asia. With one drug candidate entering into the clinical stage, Arbele displays true potential. The company is striving to provide cutting-edge platforms and services to tackle future changes.
Arbele hinted at the launch of two innovative products that will be a major breakthrough in cancer treatment. The first one is a diagnostic test to fast screen colorectal cancers (and potentially other GI cancer types) at a low cost before the expensive and invasive colonoscopy procedures. And a therapeutic product to treat advanced cancer patients who fail standard therapies without any other treatment options.
Moreover, Dr. John explained that the next generation of CAR-NK cells therapeutic products—which are off the shelf, i.e. without taking from patients’ own blood—will significantly shorten the biomanufacturing time and cut the costs to affordable levels. The team of Arbele is dedicated to building such a library of CAR-NK cells to treat GI cancers. “We believe more patients will accept the concept of next generation of cancer prevention and treatment through immunotherapy,” asserts Dr. John.
Talents are key to execute and implement the company visions and to achieve the goals. What makes Arbele unique is the combined efforts of skillful scientists and senior executives with vast experience from the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, along with highly capable legal and financial professionals, making it a pioneer in the industry. Here are the honorary mentions,
Dr. John is educated and trained at the University of Hong Kong, Karolinska (Stockholm), and Harvard (Boston). Prior to establishing Arbele, he was an academic professor for 18 years in the US, Hong Kong and Singapore, and a visiting associate professor at Harvard. Through his professorship at leading institutes, he was able to establish strong scientific, clinical, and industrial networks globally. He has published around 200 papers including NEJM, Cell, Nature Medicine, and Nature Genetics. Dr. John identified and patented CDH17 at HKU (Global Licensed to Arbele). In 2011, he found his path to the drug industry at Roche and Janssen Pharmaceutical, to lead drug discovery and development programs in oncology, immunology, and hepatitis.
Eric is a Postdoc and Instructor at the Cornell University. He is proficient with Drug/process development, Portfolio Analytics, and New Product Planning. Eric also served as the Head of Shanghai Discovery Center, Janssen Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. He is equipped with more than two decades of unmatched pharma and biotech industry experience and has led 10 clinical drug portfolios.
Dennis is a former VP of Clinical Development of Sanofi in the Asia Pacific. An alumnus of Harvard, UCSF, VCU, Chicago, Tokyo University, with an industry experience of around two decades in drug development at big pharma companies (including Genentech, Roche, BMS, and Sanofi). He has a successful track record in FDA drug filing from FIH to NDA (with 5 BLA filed). Dennis joined Arbele in 2019 and is a board-certified expert in internal medicine, allergy & immunology.
Anthony’s educational prospectus includes a BSc (1st Hon) in Biochemistry at HKUST, M.Phil in Pathology at HKU, Ph.D. in Biological Science at University of Cambridge, UK. ISO 2001 auditor; AABB assessor. He has more than a decade of industrial experience in stem cell and CAR-T cell therapy. Throughout his journey, he has led several teams as the CTO and Scientific Director. Moreover, he has 8 patents in cord blood, stem cells, storage, and processing, etc.
