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Karma Biotechnologies.

Karma aims to solve autoimmunity, allergies, and food sensitivities with our Xavine™ vaccine platform. Our goal is to do for these conditions what traditional vaccines did for infectious diseases.

Torrance, CA, USA

One Liner

One Liner
Karma aims to solve autoimmunity, allergies, and food sensitivities with our Xavine™ vaccine platform. Our goal is to do for these conditions what traditional vaccines did for infectious diseases.

What Problem We are Solving

Problem
Autoimmunity is currently treated by suppressing the patient’s entire immune system for life. The consequences of this are devastating, including high vulnerability to infections (a concern brought sharply into focus by the COVID-19 pandemic) and increased cancer risk. A better way to protect these patients would be to inhibit only the rogue immune cells that cause the problem, but currently this is impossible. Today, physicians can only treat the symptoms of autoimmunity, not the cause. Broadly speaking, the immune system has two modes: attack, and tolerate. Normally, the immune system tolerates the patient's own cells and proteins. Autoimmune disease occurs when this tolerance breaks down - Karma's goal is to restore tolerance in vivo.

About Us

About Us
We designed our Xavine™ tolerogenic vaccine platform from scratch to re-train the immune system of autoimmune patients so that tolerance is restored. Crucially, Xavines™ inhibit only the rogue immune cells that drive autoimmunity, leaving the rest of the immune system intact so it can still protect the patient. Xavines™ are based on Karma’s proprietary cell engineering nanoparticles, and are intended to be administered like a traditional vaccine. Karma's tolerogenic vaccine approach induces suppressive Tregs in vivo which then mediate tolerance. This is better than current approaches involving ex vivo expansion of Tregs cells, which is patient-specific and therefore slow, expensive, difficult to scale, and will require repeated infusions.

Business Model

Business Model
Karma's near-term monetization strategy is to license our core lipid nanoparticle platform, SNIPR, to partners in need of delivery solutions for their therapeutic payloads. For example, in 2021 Karma entered a partnership with Alloy Therapeutics to codevelop up to ten drugs. Alloy will pay Karma $500K up front per drug, with 100% data sharing and a royalty of up to 20%. Alloy has already paid Karma $250K to begin the first project. Longer-term, Karma will license our own Xavine™ therapeutics to larger partners for clinical development. A recent comp for this is Amgen's collaboration deal with EVOQ Therapeutics to discover and develop drugs for autoimmune disorders. Amgen is paying EVOQ $240 million up fronts with a royalty on sales.

Competitive Advantage

Quote
To make a tolerogenic vaccine, you need a delivery system that does not activate immune cells (i.e., put them in "attack mode"), which can deliver multiple DNA payloads, and which is stable enough to reach the correct immune cells in the spleen/lymph nodes. When Karma was founded, no such technology existed - viral vectors intrinsically activate immune cells, and lipid nanoparticles were too fragile. To solve this, we built our own lipid nanoparticle gene therapy platform, SNIPR (sub-nanoparticle intracellular payload release). SNIPR's unique chemistry makes them non-immunogenic and extremely stable (months in the fridge, weeks at body temp), and they can deliver multiple DNA payloads at once to induce tolerance in immune cells in vivo.

Revenue

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Go-To Market Strategy

Business Strategy
Karma intends to form a partnership to codevelop our Xavine™ for multiple sclerosis (MS) as soon as possible. The MS Xavine™ is a logical candidate to outlicense because it has well-defined animal models for preclinical proof-of-concept and IND-enabling studies, but is a more complex and crowded market than other target indications (such as myasthenia gravis). Licensing of the MS Xavine™ would yield significant up-front and milestone payments. One or more such deals would support development of Karma’s other Xavines™, including early clinical trials. Karma could hold future products (e.g., Xavines™ for myasthenia gravis and autoimmune encephalitis) for longer, hitting key value inflection points before licensing them on favorable terms.

Competitive Analysis

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Networking

Networking
We are open to meeting up to grab a coffee, or just to chat. We would really enjoy your feedback and insight into our venture and would be happy to discuss anything that you are currently working on to see if we can be of service!

Share

Capital

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Valuation
$17.00

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Business Stage

Business Stage
Seed

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