The current tracks.
morca.bio runs its own programs and supports others' — all aimed at the same mission: improving treatment for grade 3–4 IDH-mutant glioma. Today that means engineered, living bacteria built to ignite an anti-tumor immune response inside the tumor. Two tracks are live, at different points on the risk-and-potency curve, both testing the same core idea.
The make-or-break question
Both tracks bet on the same mechanism: ignite a controlled immune response at the tumor and let the immune system carry it to the infiltrating margin that surgery and drugs can't reach. Whether a locally-ignited response actually reaches and clears that margin is testable — and it's the central experimental focus of both programs.
Track A — internal program
Contained cavity depot
A safety-contained probiotic bacterium, placed directly in the surgical resection cavity after tumor removal. It stays alive and active only where the tumor's own oncometabolite, D-2-HG, is present — the same molecule that suppresses the local immune system becomes the cue that keeps the vehicle localized.
There it secretes a payload built to prime an anti-tumor immune response at the resection bed — the tissue closest to where recurrence begins. It's the simpler, gentler approach, with the most straightforward safety story of the two tracks.
Track B — partnership
Tumor-colonizing collaboration
A partnership around an oxygen-tolerant bacterium built to germinate and colonize inside the tumor itself, not just the resection cavity — using the same D-2-HG-based sensing to stay contained to tumor tissue.
Inside the tumor, the vehicle is designed to do more than one job: combining direct tumor destruction with immune activation, as a programmable, multi-payload living factory rather than a single-trick construct. It goes deeper into the tumor than Track A, which means more potential potency and correspondingly harder safety engineering.
Both tracks are early-stage science, built on a testable hypothesis and pursued rigorously — not a therapy available today. The honest goal is a meaningful, potentially durable response in a subset of patients, in a disease where recurrence has so far been universal.