See the 17-slide presentation a tiny biotech used to raise $47 million for a new way of fighting cancer with nutrition

• Faeth Therapeutics announced a $47 million Series A funding round on Wednesday.
• The startup is studying specialized diets as a way to slow and cure cancer.
• It’s one of the newest companies in the hot area of cancer metabolism.

Over the years dozens of health nuts and fitness gurus have claimed, untruthfully, that it is possible to cure cancer with a change in diet. Now a new startup has a similar proposition — but it’s backed by science.

San Francisco-based Faeth Therapeutics announced on Wednesday that it raised a $47 million Series A funding round to bring targeted nutrition treatments to cancer patients. This brings the company’s total funding to $67 million. The Series A round was led by S2G Ventures and also involved Khosla Ventures, Future Ventures, Digitalis, KdT Ventures, AgFunder, and Cantos.

The idea behind Faeth is that a specialized diet can potentially starve fast-growing cancer cells of the nutrients they need to proliferate and spread.

“This isn’t the kind of thing that we’re telling people to eat ashwagandha and spin around in circles three times a day,” Faeth CEO and cofounder Anand Parikh told Insider. “We’re really doing this carefully.”

Faeth’s scientific advisors include experts in the field of cancer metabolism from UCLA, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Parikh says the company’s science is also backed by published research papers.

“I am incredibly confident that there are dietary interventions that will aid in the fight against cancer that will have an impact that is akin to therapeutics,” Parikh said.

While the company is in the process of conducting early-stage human trials, so far its published research has only been in the laboratory or in mice.

“There’s been a lot of interesting developments in laboratory settings that suggest, at least in preclinical cancer models, that these are reasonable, if not very promising, options,” Jason Locasale, a cancer metabolism researcher at Duke who is not involved with Faeth Therapeutics, told Insider.

However, Locasale said, “There’s a lot of things that cure cancer very well in mice that don’t work as well in humans, so it remains to be determined how much this will be used in the future.”

See the 17-slide presentation Faeth Therapeutics used to raise $47 million.

Originally published at https://www.businessinsider.com on July 6, 2022.