Developing antibody-based cancer drugs designed to act selectively in tumors
Cancer therapies can damage healthy tissue when their targets also occur outside tumors. This can limit usable doses or stop promising treatments from progressing, leaving patients with difficult trade-offs between disease control, serious side effects and quality of life.
9Bio Therapeutics is developing cancer medicines designed to concentrate their activity in tumors and spare healthy tissue. Its approach aims to make powerful treatments easier to tolerate and open up targets that have been difficult to treat safely.
What stands out about 9Bio Therapeutics
9Bio reports cancer-cell killing at acidic pH across multiple cell lines, with no detectable activity at normal-tissue pH in lab tests.
Source ↗9Bio announced investment from Merck Digital Sciences Studio and CQDM in June 2025, alongside selection for the MDSS accelerator.
Source ↗9Bio and Vega BioImaging joined a nearly C$1.8M Quebec-backed project linking antibody cancer therapies with companion diagnostics.
Source ↗9Bio and TransBIOTech won a joint C$450,000 applied-research award through Canada’s College and Community Innovation programme.
Source ↗Canada’s NRC-IRAP awarded 9Bio C$75,000 to support development of its lead precision antibody-drug conjugate programme.
Source ↗Co-founder Henrique de Carvalho managed four drug launches across J&J, Sanofi, GSK and Medicago, including two top-ranked vaccines.
Source ↗Co-founder Philipe Gobeil led discovery and preclinical development for over a decade, including programmes that achieved out-licensing.
Source ↗9Bio won the RJCCQ’s 2025 Jeune entreprise de l’année award, announced in September 2025 and presented by National Bank of Canada.
Source ↗9Bio reports working with McGill and Université de Montréal researchers on an antibody-drug conjugate programme for metastatic cancers.
Source ↗9Bio joined adMare’s National Therapeutics Accelerator in 2024.
Source ↗9Bio joined the Creative Destruction Lab Cancer cohort in 2024/25.
Source ↗9Bio joined a C$2.06M oncology project with Molecular Forecaster and Aramis, backed by a C$1.03M Quebec grant in February 2025.
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