A delivery company built around a structural idea

ORIGIN

Out of a university lab, into a company

The company originated as a spin-out from The Ohio State University, building on DNA nanotechnology research from the laboratory of Professor Carlos Castro into scaffolded DNA origami and the placement of functional elements on folded structures.

That research base now supports a focused preclinical development effort: one delivery architecture, applied to genetic diseases where payload size, tissue targeting or repeat administration is the constraint.

2021

Company founded

Incorporated as a spin-out from The Ohio State University.

PLATFORM

The Genobot architecture

A single non-viral delivery architecture developed from the founding research base.

The company’s earliest published work was not about genes. In 2016, in Small, Patrick Halley and Chris Lucas reported DNA origami nanostructures loaded with daunorubicin, a chemotherapy agent, in a leukemia model where drug resistance normally blunts the dose. The result that mattered was not the drug. It was that a folded DNA structure could carry a payload into cells and change how that payload behaved.

Later work turned the attention to the carrier itself. A 2022 study in Small, again led by Lucas and Halley, examined how DNA origami nanostructures behave in vivo across a dose range and reported dose-dependent immunogenicity with no toxicity observed up to high doses. A 2019 method paper took on the practical obstacle that had kept DNA origami inside academic labs, reporting folding at far greater scale and lower cost than earlier approaches.