Mantra Bio

Paul Ehrlich, one of the forefathers of modern medicine, famously proposed the idea of a “magic bullet” that would selectively kill pathogens while sparing the body. His research led to the first drug for syphilis and established the chemistry-driven paradigm of therapeutics that would persist for the next 70 years. Unfortunately, it turned out that there is no simple way to achieve arbitrary targeting of cytotoxic chemical compounds, and these magic bullet treatments proved difficult to reproduce. The lack of precision delivery presents pharma with a double-edged sword: higher doses with elevated toxicity, or lower doses that are potentially inefficacious.