Immuneering CEO shares his cancer drug development strategy

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Eighteen years after co-founding Immuneering, CEO Ben Zeskind is still chasing the same goal: turn cutting-edge science into better lives for cancer patients.

The oncology biotech’s top drug candidate, atebimetinib, is currently in a Phase 2A clinical trial. It’s being tested as a treatment for pancreatic cancer, which is expected to cause nearly 53,000 deaths in the US this year, per the American Cancer Society’s 2026 cancer statistics report.

Zeskind told Healthcare Brew about what it takes to develop a new cancer drug.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?

Many people think biotech progress should be fast and flashy. In reality, it’s more like slow and steady wins the race. That applies to how we’ve developed our lead drug candidate, atebimetinib, which is heading into Phase 3 clinical trials [in mid-2026] for pancreatic cancer. Our trial drug doesn’t result in dramatic, immediate tumor shrinkage, which unfortunately for patients, can often lead to treatment resistance. Instead, atebimetinib works gradually and consistently over time, offering patients the potential of a longer duration of response with the promise of a great quality of life. Sometimes, game-changing approaches are the ones you least expect.

What’s the best change you’ve made or seen at a place you’ve worked?

The most meaningful transformation at Immuneering was our shift toward developing our own pipeline of cancer therapies. In the early years, our work centered on existing medicines and understanding why certain patients experienced unusually long overall survival with those therapies. In fact, the name Immuneering comes from our early work with checkpoint inhibitors, where we were focused on why some patients didn’t relapse and went on to have remarkably durable responses.

The major turning point came around 2018 when we realized that to bring about a future where patients could experience long-term survival, we needed to start developing our own therapeutics. That was a defining moment for Immuneering, one that reshaped not only our strategy, but our ability to directly impact patients’ lives.

What healthcare trend are you most optimistic about?

I’m most optimistic about transforming cancer into a chronic, manageable disease—much like the way HIV was transformed, thanks to medical advancements. There is great momentum in that direction, and the technologies emerging today are accelerating this shift. Deep cyclic inhibitors [like atebimetinib] are a great example: We developed a new class of cancer medicine that shifts the focus from shrinking the tumor fast to outlasting the disease.

What healthcare trend are you least optimistic about?

Too often, clinical outcomes are prioritized without attention to a patient’s quality of life and tolerability of the treatment. There’s a constant drive toward shrinking tumors, but not enough consideration for how sustainable or tolerable those treatments are for the patient.