Oligonucleotide Therapeutics

A delivery system for RNA-based therapeutics, with improved efficiency and expanded targeting.

About the Technology

What if you could send the body instructions to produce its own drug? That’s the promise of RNA-based medicines, which could treat everything from cancer and infectious disease to allergic reactions. But first, we need ways to deliver RNA therapeutics to the right cells and organs.

Current delivery systems like lipid nanoparticles and viruses often have limited organ selectivity, require complex formulations, and cause undesirable inflammatory responses. To address this, our team has developed a novel, disease-agnostic delivery platform called CARTs (charge-altering releasable transporters), which is 2.5 times more efficient than existing solutions. CARTs enable safe and precise in vivo drug delivery to organs including lungs, spleen, blood, and eyes and cell types (endothelial cells, dendritic cells, macrophages, reticulocytes, etc.). This makes them an ideal solution for existing vaccines (e.g. for COVID-19 and HIV), proof of concept cures for cancer, solutions for food security, and more, as well as a platform for cell engineering (e.g. CAR-T, CAR-NK, genomic editing).

The HIT fund will facilitate further development of our delivery platform, help us improve product-market fit and streamline clinical application through collaborations and industry partnerships.

Team Members