KiraGen
Setting the Scene
A new kind of cancer treatment, called CAR-T, trains your immune cells to find and kill cancer, but it mostly works only in blood cancers.
When used on solid tumors like brain cancer, the treatment fails because the tumor creates a toxic environment that shuts immune cells down.
Most companies try to fix this by making the cells stronger, but that can cause dangerous side effects, especially in the brain.
The smarter approach? Make the cells immune to the tumor’s tricks so they can stay focused and finish the job.
This week’s company is building cancer-fighting cells that block the tumor’s defense system before it can stop them.
In a Sentence
KiraGen uses AI to design immune cells that can resist the defenses of solid tumors like brain, lung, and breast cancer.
Immune Cells: Special white blood cells reprogrammed to find and destroy cancer.
Solid Tumors: Hard-to-treat cancers that create signals to block or weaken those immune cells.
AI: KiraGen uses machine learning to predict the best gene edits, helping design more effective treatments faster and with fewer failed experiments.
Bulleted Version:
- KiraGen is like giving immune cells noise-canceling headphones, so they can stay focused in the chaos of a tumor.
The Basics
- Headquarters: Cambridge, MA
- Employee Count: 6
- Investors:
2048 Ventures, Conscience VC, Gaingels, ZAKA VC, Lexi VC, Pareto Holdings, Incite Labs, Meru Capital Group
- Funding amount: $1.4M
- Business model: KiraGen develops its own cancer therapies and will eventually license its AI platform–predicted gene edit combinations to other biotechs and pharma companies to improve their cell therapies.
- Early traction: Lead therapy for brain cancer (GBM) showed strong results in animal models, with additional preclinical support across other solid tumors, and is now advancing toward future trials in partnership with UPenn.
Due Diligence
WHAT WE LIKE
Market Opportunity: Solid tumors represent a fast growing, nearly $200B global market with around 19M new cases annually and virtually no durable cell therapies approved to treat them.
Off-the-Shelf: Most cell therapies in solid tumors rely on modifying each patient’s own cells, while KiraGen uses donor cells that are ready-to-use, faster to make, and cheaper to scale.
Closing a Known Gap: Instead of starting from scratch, KiraGen is building directly on clinical signals from early CAR-T trials—designing a solution to the exact failure that’s holding the field back.
POTENTIAL RISKS
Clinical Translation: Strong mouse data is a start, but translating those results into durable responses in humans, especially in GBM, is still unproven.
Scalability Challenge: Even with an off-the-shelf model, manufacturing consistent cell therapies at scale is still an unsolved problem in the field.
Indication Risk: Early setbacks could cast doubt on both the lead program and the broader platform, making early clinical validation critical for investor confidence and downstream partnerships.
Founder Profile
Aaron Edwards, CEO: Previously led a gene-edited CAR-T program for T cell leukemia at Beam Therapeutics, and holds a master’s in biology and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Ryan Murray, CSO: Deep experience in immuno-oncology from roles at Beam Therapeutics and bluebird bio, where he focused on translating multiplexed CAR-T approaches for solid tumors, and holds a PhD from Northeastern.
Comps
Moonlight Bio: Boosts T cell strength using natural mutations, but only targets one gene at a time KiraGen tackles multiple tumor defenses at once.
OverT Bio: Improves T cells by adding a single protein, but lacks KiraGen’s customized, multi-gene approach built around real tumor biology.
Waypoint Bio: Gathers great data to improve CAR design, but doesn’t engineer the whole cell to resist suppression like KiraGen does.
Why KiraGen
By overcoming tumor defenses known to cause clinical failure, KiraGen is poised to be the biotech company that edits the ending for solid tumors.
