Therapeutics · Immuno-oncology
Eris Biotech
A two-founder Utah company building an oral small molecule that stops tumors from releasing the vesicles they use to switch off the immune system. Everything on the record is preclinical: mouse data, one pending patent application, and no registered trial.
A napkin at Cafe Rio
Two friends of twelve years met for lunch in Lehi, Utah. Evita Weagel had been in drug development, where promising compounds kept failing on toxicity. Rachel Brog Garlick had been at a cell therapy startup, where the treatments worked and almost nobody could get them. Over lunch they sketched an alternative on a napkin.
Weagel called a chemist friend to check whether the chemistry was even possible. He said yes. They quit their jobs. Within a few months they had a Utah state innovation grant and a place in Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, according to an interview Weagel gave TechBuzz News in December 2025.
“A lot of the therapeutics being developed were really toxic,” she told the interviewer, describing the problem as “it’s like a constant race of what kills you first.”
What the tumor whispers
Solid tumors do not simply grow. They talk. Cancer cells shed enormous numbers of extracellular vesicles, exosomes among them, carrying cargo that suppresses the immune cells around the tumor. The immune system is looking for the tumor and being told, chemically, that there is nothing to see.
That is a well studied problem and a hard one to drug. Most immuno-oncology works on a protein target: block a checkpoint receptor, engineer a cell to recognize a surface antigen. Eris is aiming at the machinery that makes the vesicles in the first place.
The company states the logic on its own site: it has identified a pathway to block immune evasion, built a first-in-class small molecule inhibitor against it, and made the drug oral so a patient does not need an infusion center. Weagel grew up in Peru, where, as she put it, “A lot of good healthcare is concentrated in the capital.”
Two scientists from the same bench
The founders met in Kim L. O’Neill’s lab at Brigham Young University, Weagel as a PhD student and Garlick as an undergraduate. They are co-authors on the same 2017 paper in OncoTargets and Therapy, on thymidine kinase 1 at the membrane of Burkitt’s lymphoma and acute lymphoblastic leukemia cells. Weagel’s 2018 dissertation carried that work forward.
Garlick then went to Dartmouth, where her published work sits squarely in cell therapy: she is a first author on a 2022 Cancer Immunology Research paper on armored CAR T cells engineered with superkine IL-2 and IL-33 to reshape the tumor microenvironment, and a co-author on a 2022 paper on directed evolution of the NKp30 stress receptor into a CAR.
Weagel is an affiliate collaborator in BYU’s Microbiology and Molecular Biology department. Neither founder has published under an Eris Biotech affiliation.
The company changed its drug
This is the part of the record that repays attention. When BioUtah announced the YC acceptance in February 2024, Eris was described as a hypoxia-activated prodrug company: compounds that stay inert until they hit the low-oxygen interior of a solid tumor, then switch on. A contemporaneous write-up added that the first candidate came out of AI screening across a library of more than 2.6 million compounds.
By 2025 the prodrug language is gone. The website, the Y Combinator launch page, Altitude Lab’s portfolio listing and the company’s one patent application all describe the same different thing: a small molecule that stops tumors from forming and releasing immune-suppressing vesicles. The mechanism of interest, tumor to microenvironment signalling, is continuous across both descriptions. The chemistry is not.
A cohort at Sloan Kettering
In 2025 Eris was one of ten companies in the Memorial Sloan Kettering Therapeutics Accelerator cohort. On December 2, 2025 it presented at MSK’s Demo Day alongside BriaCell, Saccharo and Manhattan BioSolutions. That is an independent, dated record of a preclinical company getting inside a National Cancer Institute designated center.
The same year Weagel took the Biotech Disruptor award at the Women Tech Awards in Utah. In May 2026 BioSpace found her at Altitude Lab in Salt Lake City, talking about how hard early money had become.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| FDA records | No 510(k) and no PMA. Expected for a preclinical drug rather than notable. | Not found |
| Registered trials | No study on ClinicalTrials.gov naming Eris Biotech as of September 24, 2026. | Not found |
| Peer-reviewed papers | None under an Eris Biotech affiliation. PubMed author searches return only the founders’ academic work: Weagel on thymidine kinase 1 at BYU, Garlick on CAR T cells at Dartmouth. | Public record |
| Federal grants | No NIH award and no NSF award on record. Weagel says an NSF application drew strong reviews but was rejected because a reviewer judged her milestones impossible in a year. | Public record |
| Patent | One application, WO-2026161657-A1, “Inhibiting exosome biogenesis for the treatment of cancer,” status pending, first filing date January 23, 2025, per PitchBook’s patent record. No granted patent found. | Public record |
| MSK Therapeutics Accelerator | Named in MSK’s announcement as one of ten Therapeutics Accelerator cohort companies presenting at Demo Day, December 2, 2025. | Public record |
| Altitude Lab | Listed on the Salt Lake City incubator’s portfolio as a resident, described as “Developing a first-in-class, oral immunotherapy that inhibits exosome biogenesis to prevent tumor-driven immune evasion and train body to fight cancer.” | Independent |
| Animal data | Weagel told TechBuzz News in December 2025 that the drug cures 33 percent of treated mice, with the remainder averaging half the tumor size of placebo. No dataset, model or group size has been released. | Company-stated |
| The modality on file | February 2024 descriptions call Eris a hypoxia-activated prodrug company. Every 2025 and 2026 description, including the patent title, calls it an exosome biogenesis inhibitor. The change has not been publicly explained. | Differs from earlier claim |
| Recognition | Biotech Disruptor award, 2025 Women Tech Awards, October 2025. | Independent |
Read plainly: the only hard evidence available is that serious institutions decided to spend time on this team. Y Combinator took them, Memorial Sloan Kettering put them in a therapeutics cohort, Altitude Lab gave them bench space, and a patent examiner now has an application to assess. None of that is efficacy. The 33 percent cure figure is the single quantitative claim about the drug anywhere in the public record, it comes from an interview rather than a paper, and it is a mouse number.
What to watch
- A preprint, poster or paper carrying the mouse data with model, dosing and group sizes attached. Until that exists, nobody outside the company can check the efficacy claim.
- What happens to WO-2026161657-A1: whether it enters national phase, and how broad the surviving claims are on a mechanism with a crowded academic literature.
- Whether the MSK relationship produces a named co-development project or an IND-enabling package, rather than ending at a cohort listing.
- A priced round and the Form D with it. Nothing is on file with the SEC.
- Whether mesothelioma stays the lead indication, given how thoroughly the 2024 pipeline description was replaced.
In their words
“A lot of the therapeutics being developed were really toxic”
Evita Weagel, co-founder and CEO, TechBuzz News, December 2025 · Interview
“I wanted to harness the power of the immune system inside the tumor microenvironment”
Evita Weagel, TechBuzz News, December 2025 · Interview
“Since we wanted to do something very patient-centric, we came up with this idea of making it in a pill form”
Evita Weagel, TechBuzz News, December 2025 · Interview
“We wanted geography not to matter. We wanted everyone to have the same access to life-saving medications.”
Evita Weagel, TechBuzz News, December 2025 · Interview
“Right now, our drug is curing 33% of the mice we treat”
Evita Weagel, TechBuzz News, December 2025 · Company-stated
“You’re really fighting the whole environment”
Evita Weagel, on raising capital, BioSpace, May 2026 · Independent
“We have this mentality that if one of us wins, all of us win”
Evita Weagel, on the Altitude Lab founder community, BioSpace, May 2026 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordRecords pull: no FDA, trial, NIH, PubMed or Form D record for the company
- Public recordPatent application WO-2026161657-A1, Inhibiting exosome biogenesis for the treatment of cancer
- Public recordDemo Day 2025 Showcases MSK Therapeutics Accelerator and iHub Challenge
- Public recordMSK Therapeutics Accelerator program page
- Public recordBiomarker analysis and clinical relevance of TK1 on the cell membrane of Burkitt’s lymphoma
- Public recordMembrane expression of thymidine kinase 1 in lung, breast and colorectal malignancies
- Public recordThymidine Kinase 1 in Solid and Hematological Malignancies, doctoral dissertation
- Public recordSuperkine IL-2 and IL-33 Armored CAR T Cells Reshape the Tumor Microenvironment
- Public recordEvita Weagel, affiliate collaborator listing
- IndependentFounders face pressure from all sides as biotech crawls toward recovery
- InterviewSheTech Interns Interview Evita Weagel
- IndependentWomen Tech Awards 2025 winners
- IndependentAltitude Lab portfolio, resident company listing
- IndependentEris Biotech accepted to Y Combinator
- IndependentEris Biotech company profile, funding, investors and patents
- IndependentEris Biotech portfolio page
- CompanyEris Biotech website, Harnessing Immunity to Halt Cancer
- CompanyLaunch YC: Eris Biotech, drugs that reawaken the immune system
- CompanyEris Biotech launches: cancer drugs that target tumors without poisoning the body
- CompanyEvita Weagel post on the Biotech Disrupter Award
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
