Jason West, co-founder and EVP of NextGen Scientific, joins Mookie on Bald Ambition to talk about a cancer drug with an unusual origin story. Instead of starting in a billion-dollar lab, it started with a weed growing wild across the Middle East, a plant people have brewed into tea and used as a folk remedy for cancer since at least the 9th century.

NextGen's founder, chemist Gene Zaid, grew up in the Middle East watching family members use that same plant, Arum Palestinum, as a traditional treatment. Curious why an 1,100-year-old remedy was still in use, with one study finding roughly 22 percent of Palestinians with a cancer diagnosis still drinking it today, his team isolated three naturally occurring molecules from the plant, found the specific ratio that made them work together, and synthesized a new compound out of them. The result, GZ17-6.02, is what's known as a super-enhancer modulator, a drug that acts on the master genetic switches sitting above individual genes rather than targeting one mutation at a time. Jason walks through why that approach has shown activity against a striking range of biologically unrelated cancers in early testing, and why it's designed to work alongside existing chemotherapies rather than replace them.

The conversation gets expansive: how a drug actually moves from a lab observation through animal testing into human trials, why every patient in a cancer phase one trial receives the real drug rather than a placebo, and the genuinely humbling moment their own scientific advisor, a leading oncologist, questioned why they'd included a third molecule the existing research said shouldn't work, only to watch it turn out to be essential. Jason and Mookie also get into why AI, for all its strengths, couldn't have found that third ingredient on its own, and take a harder look at the broken economics of clinical trial costs, where identical procedures can run five times more expensive simply because they're labeled as part of a trial.

The Drug

GZ17-6.02 is currently investigational and has not yet been approved by the FDA for any use. The formulation is being studied in an ongoing Phase 1b trial for advanced prostate cancer at Virginia Commonwealth University, with a second trial for a precancerous skin condition set to begin in Sweden and the Netherlands.

The Guest

Jason West is co-founder and Executive Vice President of NextGen Scientific, a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing novel cancer therapeutics derived from naturally occurring compounds. He holds a JD and MBA.

More from NextGen Scientific: https://investinnextgen.com

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