We're investing in Brink Tx
In-vivo cell therapy via Directed Evolution
On The Brink
We’re investing in Brink Therapeutics, a company working to make gene therapy accessible at scale. Gene therapy may sound futuristic, but it’s already here—it’s just not equally distributed. The challenge? These treatments are expensive, complex to manufacture, and limited in scope. Brink is solving this by pioneering in-vivo cell therapy: instead of extracting and modifying a patient’s cells outside the body, they are developing a way to insert therapeutic genes directly into the right cells, safely and efficiently. If successful, this could radically expand access to life-saving treatments while cutting costs by orders of magnitude.
Founders Jonathan Naccache, PhD, Harry Kemble, PhD, and Professor Andrew Griffiths (ESPCI) plan to make this a reality. Jonathan and Harry met as early employees at Detect, a diagnostics startup specializing in at-home PCR testing that took off (for obvious reasons) during the pandemic. Combining their expertise in computational biology, they joined forces with Prof. Griffiths— a world-renowned molecular biologist specializing in high-throughput screening, selection, and directed evolution—to bring a new category of medicine to the world.
Miracle Drug
In 2012, a 6-year-old girl in Philadelphia battling acute lymphoblastic leukemia was enrolled in a CAR-T cell therapy Phase I trial as a last resort. This novel therapy extracted and genetically reprogrammed her T-cells to target the cancer upon re-insertion. Remarkably, it worked. Over a decade later, she is alive and in remission.
This success story spawned a multi-billion-dollar industry, proving that gene therapies could cure previously untreatable diseases. However, these treatments remain prohibitively expensive, difficult to scale, and limited in their reach. Brink is building a platform to change that.
Cell & Gene Therapy 101
CAR-T and other emerging gene edited cell therapies promise to transform modern medicine. These are living drugs — simply insert genetic instructions into your existing cells, and voila, you’re permanently cured (in some cases with 98% efficacy). Today, however, these miracles come with major barriers:
The only safe way to manufacture these therapies is ex-vivo (outside the body) which is time-consuming and costly — not to mention a mediocre patient UX.
It’s going to cost you $1.5M/dose (well, your insurance — if you have it)
That is only if you are one of the lucky ones: there are around 6K doses for roughly 1.3M patients annually (.4% chance!)
What if you could bypass the entire cell therapy manufacturing process? Instead of extracting and modifying cells externally, you could deliver a therapeutic gene directly into the body, using a cell-specific delivery vector and gene-insertion machinery. Faster, better, cheaper.
But there’s a catch: existing gene-insertion methods are either ineffective or unsafe.
CRISPR Doesn’t Cut It (Pun Intended)
There have been significant advances in our understanding of therapeutic genes (“the cargo”), solid developments in cell specific delivery vectors (“targeting”), but little to no advances in safe and efficient gene insertion techniques (“the machinery”).
The average person has heard of mRNA (thanks, COVID) and maybe CRISPR-Cas9. However, many gene insertion methods exist, each with tradeoffs. One promising avenue is recombinases—Nature’s own gene-insertion tools. Recombinases offer key advantages: high precision, efficiency, no DNA damage, and compatibility across cell states.
Except for one major problem: they aren’t programmable. What if you could take Nature’s “machinery” for gene-editing and put it through Nature’s very own programming tool: evolution. Brink’s mission is to make this a reality.
“A hypothetical fully reprogrammable recombinase would be, in some respects, an ultimate genome editing agent.”
— David R. Liu (Professor, Harvard University, inventor, CRISPR Base Editing, Prime)
Directed Evolution
Using a technique called Directed Evolution, Brink is engineering recombinases to be programmable, unlocking their full potential for therapeutic gene insertion. Their approach stands out in three ways:
Scale – Their proprietary in vitro platform enables parallel screening at an unprecedented scale, screening billions of variants per day (compared to thousands with traditional methods).
Efficiency – Brink’s computational tools allow them to optimize starting points, identifying natural recombinases that are already closer to the desired outcome—cutting down development time.
Intelligence – This process generates vast amounts of functional data, which can be used to train AI models that accelerate future discovery and, eventually, enable instant recombinase programming.
Brink’s initial focus is on cancer, autoimmune, and infectious disease applications. But the implications of programmable gene insertion go far beyond these areas—it’s a foundational technology that could reshape how we develop and deliver genetic medicine.
The team is already hard at work with their sights trained on cancer, autoimmune and infection disease indications. We’re excited to be supporting Jonathan and Harry as they embark on this ambitious journey!
Come chat with Unit VC on X: Kyle & Rand or have a look at our portfolio here.