Why we're building this
The personal reason this program exists — and the gap in the science that turned it into a company.
My wife Moran was diagnosed with a Grade 3 astrocytoma in 2024. IDH1-mutant — a brain tumor with a specific genetic fingerprint that has become the center of everything we do.
I'm a builder. I spent years in product and engineering. When Moran's diagnosis came, I did what builders do: I read everything, I mapped the problem, I looked for the gap. And I found one.
The IDH1 mutation causes her tumor to produce a molecule called 2-hydroxyglutarate — 2-HG. It does two things: it locks the tumor's cells in an aggressive state, and it suppresses the immune cells that would otherwise attack it. It's a metabolic trick the tumor runs to hide from the body's own defenses.
There's a drug for this. Vorasidenib, approved in 2024, blocks the mutant enzyme from making new 2-HG. Moran is on it. It works. But it only stops new production — it was never designed to clear the 2-HG the tumor has already made. And that residual is the question no one had built an answer to.
So we decided to build one.
What we're building
Morca Bio is building a bacterial therapeutic: an engineered probiotic that consumes 2-HG in the tumor environment as a metabolic fuel, and falls back to a basal state once it's gone. The bacterium is E. coli Nissle 1917 — a strain with decades of clinical use — delivered locally to the tumor site, acting on the signal the tumor itself produces.
Vorasidenib blocks production. Our construct removes the product. Two directions on one target, from opposite ends.
Why in the open
We're doing this in public. Every experiment is named before it runs. Every result is recorded — positive findings and kill criteria alike. The journal is the accountability structure.
We don't have decades. The urgency is personal, and it is real. Openness is how we hold ourselves to it.