Close-up of a Bionaut™/Photo courtesy of Jon McKee Photography
Diseases of the brain are often considered the holy grail of the therapeutic landscape – and Bionaut Labs, who today emerged from stealth mode in a $20 million Series A, is sending its Bionauts™ off in search of it.
Bionauts™, a novel treatment modality that uses remote-controlled
microscale robots to deliver biologics, nucleic acids, or small molecule
therapies to precise areas of the brain, have the potential to boldly
go where no therapy has gone before, opening up new pathways in the
fight against devastating CNS disorders like brainstem glioma and
Huntington’s disease.
“There was this film called Fantastic Voyage that actually has a
submarine going into the brain and treating an aneurysm I think. What
used to be science fiction now is really science reality, because, over
the last few decades, science has allowed us to effectively manufacture
micro-scale objects, and scale rapid prototyping capabilities,” said
Bionaut Labs’ co-founder and chief executive officer, Michael
Shpigelmacher.
Khosla Ventures, which led this round of financing, clearly agreed.
“We are thrilled to bring Bionaut Labs out of stealth mode as it
typifies the type of new impactful technology companies we like to help
build,” said Khosla founder, Vinod Khosla. “Bionauts™ hold great promise
as a new targeted treatment modality for severe brain disorders for
which there are few, if any, effective treatment options. Moreover, the
broad therapeutic potential of Bionauts™ extends to many diseases where
conventional therapies are limited or lacking.”
Joining Khosla in the syndicate were Upfront Ventures, Revolution, BOLD Capital and Compound.
A significant part of the Bionauts™’ potential lies in augmenting the
efficacy of gene therapies, CRISPR, anti-sense oligonucleotides (ASOs),
and oncolytic viruses.
“We bring into the picture the anatomical precision, getting into the
right anatomical target, and then once we release the payload, it
provides the cellular, or biochemical precision, in the right spot. And
that is oftentimes the gap, that anatomical precision,” Shpigelmacher
said.
Bionaut’s inaugural pursuit is glioma – a deadly malignant tumor
found within the glial tissue of the nervous system that continues to
confound scientists and surgeons alike. Shpigelmacher explained how the
right systemic delivery mechanism could revolutionize the CNS treatment
space.
“All of the brain conditions, largely all of the CNS conditions,
suffer from the fact that the brain and CNS is uniquely designed to
protect itself from the external world, and that means that the
blood-brain barrier prevents effective systemic treatment. Which means
that if one can build a gateway to the CNS, you can treat many
conditions potentially with one tool. That’s what we’re aiming to do,”
he said.
Thus far, in animal studies, Bionaut has successfully treated
orthotopic glioma tumors in mice, eliminating toxicity with guided
delivery of therapeutic payloads directly into the tumor. The company
plans to conduct Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) studies in 2022, with
the hope of reaching the clinic in 2023.
Once Bionaut has established the modality in glioma, it plans to
embark on riskier therapeutic pursuits, such as Huntington’s disease.
“For Huntington’s…there are promising payloads, but they’re not at
the point where they are clinically approved or well-characterized,”
Shpigelmacher said. “Our going hypothesis is that instead of treating
the entire CSF [Cerebrospinal fluid] volume around the whole brain and
spine, or instead of doing an invasive procedure, we could deliver those
payloads in a targeted fashion toward a specific location around the
basal ganglia.”
Shpigelmacher predicted that micro-robots have the potential to change the way therapeutics are developed.
“Most drugs fail the FDA approval because of dosage problems because
they can’t get the efficacy on target to be good enough while not being
toxic off-target,” he said. “If you have a technology like Bionaut™ that
allows you to engineer the therapeutic index to release a payload only
where you need it, not in other places, then you can actually reduce the
cost of your drug R&D and duration of your clinical trials because
you don’t spend as much effort and resources on dosage optimization.”
