Aug 6, 2025

Aron Knickerbocker, President and CEO of Aulos Bioscience,  is on a mission to extend the lives of cancer patients through safer and more effective immunotherapy using AI and machine learning to accelerate drug discovery and optimization. The company's lead drug candidate is an antibody that was designed using AI to harness the power of interleukin-2 to activate the immune system against tumors.  The advantages of AU-007 over previous IL-2 therapies include the ability to selectively activate tumor-fighting immune cells while avoiding toxicity due to vascular leakage. Current trials are underway in advanced melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer, which are showing the potential for durable responses and immune memory.

Aron explains, "So Aulos has really been founded to carry out a mission to extend the lives of patients with innovative, safe, and ultimately effective cancer immunotherapy. And you mentioned IL-2, which is the naturally occurring protein that we're seeking to harness and redirect in productive ways to help the patients. And this has really been kind of a driver for me over the years, wanting to improve on cancer patient care. This is a company with an important mission and a great team, and our program is really interesting. It's harnessing IL-2 in such a way that it sends it to the cells that are capable of attacking the tumor and killing the tumor cells, and keeps it away from the cells that suppress the immune response. It's really kind of using a double-edged sword in a productive way to help patients with cancer."

"So this is the first antibody to go into human clinical trials. It was designed in part by leveraging an AI platform, as you noted. And that platform was created by our collaborators at Biologic Design. They're the company that created this molecule. And what biologic design does is essentially using an AI system that has machine learning algorithms that drive it. It mimics what the immune system does normally. So when we get sick and we need to make antibodies to something, our immune system says, Do I already have something that will kind of bind to the target or the virus or whatever it's trying to hit? And then it will optimize that. It will go through a process of rapid change. And what the AI system and the machine learning algorithms that have been trained on millions of antibodies in the targets to which they bind do is recognize patterns much like an AI chatbot might recognize language patterns."

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