Founder feature: Pushing the boundaries of targeted breast cancer treatment
Katja Vetvik, founder of Thelper, talks curiosity, creativity and her relentless drive to improve oncology outcomes.
Former surgeon turned biotech entrepreneur, Katja is pioneering targeted therapies for aggressive cancers. “I’ve been asking—why? Why do we have cancer? And that’s where I am now. I’m addressing the root causes of cancer,” she explains.
Katja’s interdisciplinary research identified a virus (human cytomegalovirus or HCMV) as playing a role in aggressive forms of breast cancer. Now, her biotech company, Thelper, is developing antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) to specifically target HCMV viral proteins. This method can spare healthy tissue, reduce side effects and offer greater therapeutic potential. In other words, it can save lives.
Curiosity fuels innovation
“The level of knowledge and understanding in the field of medicine can sometimes be too superficial. I mean, we can send a Tesla Roadster to outer space, but we don’t know why people get cancer, and until we understand why, I think we will not be able to discover a cure for cancer. We shouldn’t accept knowledge on such a superficial level,” Katja declares.
Her intellectual curiosity and passion for helping others is palpable. From an early age growing-up in Finland where she attended a high school specializing in athletics, Katja was always curious about health and the human body. Driven by a desire to help others, she pursued a medical degree and PhD at Karolinska Institute in Sweden and moved to Norway after graduating to work as a surgical resident. The demanding long hours and night shifts, however, were incompatible with raising three young children, so Katja pivoted to the pharmaceutical industry where she gained valuable insights into drug development.
Frustrated by the industry’s unending compromise between scientific potential and go-to-market considerations, Katja returned to clinical practice. She practiced as a breast cancer surgeon and immersed herself in cancer treatment and research.
She soon began questioning conventional oncological approaches:
“As a physician, you’re very tied to guidelines and protocols. That was not very satisfying for me. I kept thinking we could do so much more.”
Her curiosity drove her to explore the root causes of cancer, particularly aggressive forms, leading her to investigate viral factors that might influence cancer progression.
New treatment possibilities
Katja’s path took an interesting turn in 2017 when her husband’s job took them to Asia for six years, first to Bangkok and then Singapore. Unable to practice medicine due to language barriers and the temporary nature of their stay, she immersed herself in cancer research, focusing on immunology, virology, and oncology. She followed-up on her earlier studies into the human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) and began to investigate its role in cancer, a link that had been underexplored for decades.
Katja’s findings revealed that HCMV was present in a startling 96% of breast cancer metastases. The discovery means that HCMV may drive cancer progression by reprogramming cancer cells to evade the body’s immune system and contributing to cell migration, helping them to spread more aggressively.
Recent acceptance in the medical field that viruses like HPV and Epstein-Barr increase cancer risk has supported her work with HCMV. Katja believes that as research progresses, the percentage of cancers linked to viruses, currently estimated at around 10 percent, will increase, thereby opening-up new possibilities for treatment.
Katja’s first instinct was to design a protocol to treat breast cancer patients using existing antiviral medication. “But I realized ‘no way’, I can’t use these drugs,” she reflects. Patients would become resistant to the antiviral medication and likely regress within a few months.
“It would be heartbreaking—to give someone hope and then take it away.” Unable to accept the idea of giving patients an inefficient drug, Katja began to rethink oncology treatments.
“ If we target this virus (HCMV) in tumors, maybe we can treat the cancer. And that’s the basic hypothesis of my company. ”
In 2019, Katja founded the biotech startup, Thelper, which initially focused on developing bispecific antibodies to target HCMV in cancer cells, but ultimately shifted to antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) which offered greater efficacy. These ADCscarry a kind of backpack with toxic payloads and target cancer cells through viral proteins, essentially sparing healthy tissue and reducing potential side effects.
“ We’ve run mouse trials showing that this drug can completely kill the tumours without causing any side effects, even at doses far exceeding the necessary amount. I think it’s amazing. ”
Katja acknowledges a gamut of challenges: scientific impediments like studying HCMV, owing to its species (human) specificity, to the financial toll of entrepreneurship. She emphasises the scale of funding required for drug development and the prohibitive costs of filing medical patents.
In the early days, Katja and her husband bootstrapped Thelper. Recent funding from the Norwegian Research Council was ‘absolutely crucial’ in enabling continued innovation. Having successfully attracted global talent, such as Dr. Ernest Aw, who joined Thelper right out of his immunology PhD from Harvard University, Katja describes her small team of four as ‘amazing’. Working together primarily on product development, “We didn’t build a big structure,” Katja explains. “We put all our resources on R&D.”
Looking ahead, Katja envisions a future where targeting viruses like HCMV could transform cancer therapies making them more personalized and effective. Her startup is driving a paradigm shift towards a root-cause approach to oncology that challenges conventional methods.
Snapshot:
Founder: Katja Vetvik
Country of origin: Finland
Company: Thelper
Year founded: 2019
What the company does: Improving the treatment of aggressive cancers by developing highly effective Antibody-Drug Conjugates (ADCs) that target cancer cells through viral proteins, sparing healthy tissue and reducing potential side effects.
Sector: Biotech
Number of employees: Four
Markets served: Early-stage / pre-clinical biotech
