Mestastop Solutions: Arnab Roy Chowdhury's Metastasis Biotech

Mestastop Solutions, a deep-tech biotechnology company founded by Arnab Roy Chowdhury, is building therapies designed to stop cancer cells from becoming metastatic. The company has secured Phase 2 clinical trial approval in India and is pursuing FDA IND approval for a colorectal cancer drug candidate.

It is also closing a new funding round to support operations for the next two and a half years.

Mestastop began in 2018 with an initial investment of approximately ₹1 crore from Chowdhury’s personal funds, including proceeds from the sale of his house in Kolkata. Since then it has raised approximately ₹22 crore, made up of ₹4 crore in government grants and ₹18 crore from equity investors. Those investors include Mumbai Angels, 92 Angels, Malpani Family Office and IIMA Ventures.

Chowdhury holds a PhD in parasitology and completed his postdoctoral work at Johns Hopkins University, where he focused on drug discovery. He later managed discovery programmes for global pharmaceutical companies including GSK and Abbott during his time at Aragen, formerly GVK Bio, and later with Amgen.

The company is structured around intellectual property rather than contract research or services. It has filed nine international patents, two of which have been granted. Its long-term revenue plan is to out-license proprietary technologies to companies in the United States or Europe through upfront payments and milestone-based arrangements.

Mestastop runs four research platforms. METAssay breaks metastasis biology into 30 experimental steps, METSCAN applies AI to patient tumour data and clinical outcomes, and METVivo uses animal models to identify proteins that may drive metastatic success. METGuard screens approved drugs for their ability to delay metastasis.

According to the interview, METGuard has helped identify existing drugs that reduced metastasis by 50% in 250 Indian patients, with similar results in a 10,000-patient study in the UK.

Chowdhury said his years in drug discovery showed him a persistent limitation in cancer treatment. “The real challenge is not only how cancer cells grow. It is how they move, adapt, and spread.”

He said personal losses to cancer strengthened his resolve to pursue a different direction in cancer science. Of the company’s goal, he said: “If we can prevent cancer from becoming metastatic, we can change the trajectory of the disease for millions of patients.”

On how he measures success, he said: “Success is defined by reducing the anxiety and fear experienced by cancer patients and their families during the period between scans.”

Around 90% of cancer-related deaths are estimated to be caused by metastasis rather than the primary tumour. Conventional treatment, including surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and targeted therapies, is aimed mainly at the primary tumour and does not always prevent later spread.

Mestastop’s thesis is that preventing or delaying metastasis could improve outcomes for high-risk patients. Its aim is to develop therapies that can be given to primary tumour patients to reduce the likelihood of their disease becoming metastatic.

The company’s current diagnostic process takes approximately 10 to 12 weeks, and it aims to cut that to three or four weeks over the next one to two years. Shorter turnaround would make personalised diagnostics more commercially viable for clinicians and more practical for patients, and would allow doctors to make more timely decisions based on a patient’s metastatic risk profile.

The company’s next major challenge is the move from research and development to global clinical validation, which requires demonstrating safety, efficacy and reproducibility across patient populations, regulatory environments and clinical settings.