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CyGenica “teleports” biological payloads safely through living cell walls
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Bill Liao
Bill Liao
June 9, 2021

That’s why we invested.

Nusrat Sanghamitra, CyGenica CEO and co-founder
Nusrat Sanghamitra, CyGenica CEO and co-founder.

Cells have walls and doors. What if you could teleport anything you like through the walls? Modern medicine relies on a huge variety of strategies to get drugs into living cells in the body. These methods have so far got one or other significant drawbacks. This is particularly true for RNA and DNA therapies. Getting into the right cell without damaging anything and without triggering an immune system alarm is tough.

The entire field is called delivery or molecular delivery. The methods of delivery are as exotic as they are diverse. From live viruses to gold nanoparticles, there is a huge effort underway to find a readily compatible, non-toxic, non-immunogenic delivery system.

One of the reasons many of our drugs come with massive side effects is how inefficient they are at getting into cells. A truly efficient delivery system could reduce dosages of, say, chemotherapy drugs by a factor of 10. Imagine powerful chemotherapy with fewer side effects than aspirin.

Genetic therapies are even more difficult to deliver. Our cells have evolved specifically to keep foreign DNA out, not to let it in.

Researchers go so far as to use tools like gene guns to blow DNA through cell walls. That is as violent and destructive as it sounds. Many modern genetic therapies rely instead on viruses to get into cells. Viruses come equipped with a kind of skeleton key (Covid’s spike protein is one) that allows them to break into cells via the “door.” Our bodies are wise to these tricks and mount a massive immune response.

For decades, biologists have been looking for a sort of biological USB thumb drive that can place drugs and genetic therapies inside cells without any side-effects.

Back in 2017, Nusrat Sanghamitra joined SOSV’s RebelBio in Ireland (IndieBio EU) accelerator program from India. She claimed to have a potential solution for delivery of drugs. Our science team was deeply skeptical.

We suggested she try using her new delivery molecule to place a plasmid (a piece of DNA) into cell cultures. This was an almost impossible task and Nusrat had never delivered such a large molecular payload before. She took on the project with much vigour and not a little anxiety. To everyone’s surprise, it worked!

Since then, the SOSV team has been quietly funding and nurturing Nusrat’s CyGenica and her team as they further developed and tested their delivery molecule, now called USG (Universal a homage to USB), into an unprecedented range of living cell types — from bacterial to human cancer — with a huge range of payload sizes including a full (and huge) CRISPR CAS 9 task.

I am proud to say they have passed every test and have a small mountain of independently verified test data that supports the non-toxic nature of the system and its super minimal immunogenicity footprint.

USG works in a totally different way to other delivery methods; it is like teleporting through the walls of the living cells while holding on to the payload. The cell walls are left pristine and there is no virus needed.

USG is readily conjugated with various payloads (everything from gene therapies to chemotherapy drugs to antibiotics) and targeting molecules (such as antibodies and aptamers). Best of all, it is very cost effective to produce. The CyGenica team, working from labs in India and Ireland, are already experts at conjugation (also DNA Fusing).

For me, CyGenica is the big one; I got into biotech investing for an outsize impact like this! We just led (something SOSV almost never does!) and closed a seed round into the company and this is just the beginning. We are pleased to be joined by co-investors David Rowan (Voyagers Health Tech), Sami Mikati, and Sharaf Ahmad Zaki Yamani.

CyGenica is on track for an incredible future because its technology has many applications that can revolutionise every aspect of healthcare and biotechnology. Nusrat’s story is definitely going to be one for the history books!

CyGenica is now actively seeking partners from all fields of life sciences, biotechnology and pharmacology.

I am personally honoured to serve as the company chair person and am delighted to have CyGenica in the SOSV family.

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