The startup, launched out of CEO Kevin Parker’s grad school idyll during the COVID lockdowns, is primed to find new targets where Big Pharmas won’t dare.
Back in the old days of the early 2020s, using gene sequencing to find drug targets was a messy business.
“The traditional method was bulk sequencing—take an entire tissue, explode it all, measure the average,” Kevin Parker, the co-founder and CEO of Cartography Biosciences and recent BioSpace 40 Under 40 honoree, told BioSpace. But diseases like cancer are highly complex, potentially driven by a mutation in a cell that may make up just 1% of a tumor but carries a critical gene mutation that would make a great therapeutic target.
“It’s like you have a smoothie with 100 apples, but you’re looking for bananas,” Parker said.
Parker wants to help the biopharma business find more bananas in a moment where low-risk, late-stage programs are the main target of dealmaking.
“We need new targets, and I think it’s hard right now with where the broader macro environment is,” Parker said. “We’re in a tough spot for new biology; we are running out of targets to go after. And somebody has to be ringing the bell for this, that we need to be investing in it as a field.”
That’s why he founded Cartography, as a graduate student sequestered in boredom during the COVID-19. Five years after its conception, the company is going strong, having earlier this month secured a $67 million series B fundraise to push its pipeline forward.
Reading the Writing on the Wall
Locked out of his lab at Stanford University, Parker was looking for a way to turn his work in a more patient-centric direction as he whiled away the hours.
“I wanted to move on,” Parker said. “You could see the writing on the wall that PhD research would be really really hard for a few years.”
He was working at Howard Cheng’s lab when the lockdowns came, studying the toxicities that patients can experience after getting CAR T and other immunotherapies. With genome sequencing, especially single-cell sequencing, growing rapidly more robust and more precise, Parker and his collaborators made a bet that with better genomic data they could pick better immunotherapy targets that are easier on patients. They went to investors with a back-of-the-envelope proof-of-concept.
“People were analyzing five to ten patients, 30,000 cells in summer 2020,” Parker said. “Twenty to 30 patients, 50 to100,000 cells were the larger programs.” The molecular methods to profile cells in a truly high-throughput manner didn’t exist, especially when looking for immunotherapy targets in highly complex tissues with many different cell types. Parker bet that the single-cell sequencing methods he and others in the field were developing could simply do a better job of finding hard-to-reach targets.
He pointed to Elzonris, an anti-cancer antibody made by the Menarini Group. The antibody is fused to diphtheria toxin that targets CD123 to treat blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm (BPDCN) and comes with a warning for causing capillary leak syndrome. It turns out this is due to the high expression of CD123 in blood vessels—something older sequencing methods wouldn’t have picked up.
“If you look at a bulk sequencing big dataset, and you type in CD123, its expression is a little bit low, a little bit medium, but it’s kind of everywhere, nothing really jumps out. If you look at single-cell data, immediately you see vasculature. Every single tissue lights up,” Parker said. With the kind of technology Cartography is developing, Parker reasons, scientists can gain a more nuanced view of the relevant biology to develop safer drugs.
Putting the Patient in Focus
Today, with dozens of employees and Gilead as a partner, Parker’s COVID-era bet is paying off. The scale of sequencing that Cartography and other companies are doing now is, according to Parker, two orders of magnitude larger than what existed in 2020. The Gilead deal, signed in 2024, included $20 million upfront to discover targets in triple-negative breast cancer and lung adenocarcinoma.
Parker never dreamed of starting a biotech company as a kid. Both his parents are organic chemistry PhDs. His dad became a patent attorney and his mom worked in DNA synthesis.
“I never wanted to be a scientist because they were scientists. In high school I hated biology,” Parker said. In college, the subject started to make more sense to him because, instead of the rote memorization of high school, he was able to ask questions and find answers.
“I was really interested in that process of decisions—stem cells into neurons—how do the same things keep happening despite all this flexibility going on.” That was intellectually satisfying, but one thought bothered Parker in the back of his mind.
“Where is the patient?” in all this research, he asked.
Cartography is targeting them now. The company’s current focus is on lead molecule CBI-1214, a T cell engager that targets a marker it says is minimally expressed on healthy cells to treat colorectal cancers.
Looking to the future, Cartography is in combining those hard-to-find bananas to create highly specific dual targeting anti-cancer medications, Parker told BioSpace.
“It’s hard enough to find single targets, but it’s almost impossible to find target pairs from bulk data,” he said. “I think that’s where the field is moving long term and where we see the data supporting it, both on the target side and also on the molecule development side.”
