5.10.23-Ecosystem-Kano-Therapeutics

FLORIS ENGELHARDT: All right, wonderful. Hi, it's great to be back. We are actually pretty much a brainchild that was added through John Roberts, who said in 2020, when I came here as a post-doc, Floris, if you want to build a company, I can put you in front of industry partners and you can just see if your technology has a value. Apparently it does.

We started Kano with my co-founder from MBA Sloan, operational since last year. We've since grown to six people. We added all these different structures. And what are we doing? We make replacement parts for the human genome. So replacement parts for the human genome are DNA.

Let me take a step back. So we are all perfect, but our DNA can have errors. That is normally not much of a problem. But if it is, if it becomes a problem, this is a pretty huge one. And therefore-- sorry, I'm just like-- therefore I'm here to tell you how does that all work?

Let's just say you go into the woods, and you have instructions. And you see these instructions. It's kind of interesting to see that. But actually what you want to see is this. So just a small letter changes, but a huge difference for the instruction and what you actually have to do after you get this instruction.

And that is what happens in the human genome if you have errors. Now when you think then about different patients, they will have different variations into the human genome. And the problem right now is that we try to tackle error by error replacements instead of just tackling the replacement of the full gene. If we want to replace full genes, we need complete genes for complete cures. And that's when Kano comes into place.

We have seen that the big, big issue is that technologies are out there that edit, but they cut and they cannot necessarily insert. For inserting a new replacement part into the human genome, we need a new biomaterial, a biomaterial that is safer and more efficient, because the current standards are toxic. And they basically let our cells die.

What we do is we are exploring the alternative. The alternative is writing the genetic information into one single strand of DNA. The reason single-stranded DNA is not used today is that, despite all attempts, there is no scalable manufacturing method. And we said, OK, let's not use chemical synthesis or enzymatic approaches that are proven to be expensive and cannot scale.

But let's use synthetic biology. We build a synthetic biology platform that allows us to scale manufacturing of these important biomolecules. And now we are at the point where we can expand that and say, OK, now that we can make all these materials, what comes next? It comes next the point where we can say, let's explore three-dimensional design with a computational algorithm.

We can make that physically in the lab, test it, screen it, and then build a learning databank that allows us to enable new genetic cures. We are not the ones who say we want to bring this into the clinic with our own therapeutic pipelines. We are here to be indication and application-agnostic, to work with partners and say, you have a pharmaceutical pipeline.

You've got a target. You've got an indication. But what you're lacking is the right material that is safe and efficient. So what we did right now over the past year is that we built all the different parts of the platform. We now want to connect it. And to connect it we're looking for partners who want to engage with us, and say let's use this new novel material in our delivery pipeline for our editing tools and explore that to get single-stranded DNA gene templates into the clinic.

So takeaway, I know, you shouldn't do takeaways, but I'm doing it anyway. [LAUGHS] We have 20,000 genes into our human genome, 20,000. We have currently 2,000 clinical trials of cell and gene therapies. And we only expect 23 actually hitting the market this year. There's a huge bottleneck on getting innovation to the patient. And that's why we're building a platform with complete genes for complete cures. Thank you.