Therapeutics · mRNA and cell therapy
Kernal Biologics
A Boston company designing messenger RNA that switches on only inside the cells it is aimed at, now building an in vivo CAR T therapy on that idea. Ten years in, the lead program is still preclinical.
The drug that reached orbit before it reached a patient
In October 2020 synthetic messenger RNA molecules designed in a Cambridge, Massachusetts lab rode a Northrop Grumman resupply capsule to the International Space Station. The listed principal investigator was Yusuf Erkul, a physician who had left Merck to start a company.
The reason was not publicity. Microgravity changes how cells build ribosomes, the machines that read mRNA and turn it into protein. Kernal Biologics had staked its thesis on a difference between cancer ribosomes and healthy ones. Orbit was a stress test no bench in Kendall Square could reproduce.
“It’s an extreme measure not required by the FDA, but we believe it will help us identify assets that will have a much higher likelihood of success in the clinic,” Erkul told Fierce Biotech that month.
Six years later the company has not dosed one patient. It has raised roughly $35.5 million in venture capital, won a federal award of up to $48 million, and changed lead candidate twice.
It is still operating, with presentations at ASGCT in May 2026 and BIO in June.
A different dialect inside the cell
The mRNA vaccines that became household names in 2021 do not need to be fussy. A vaccine wants protein made, and it hardly matters where. A cancer drug is the opposite. An mRNA that tells a cell to kill itself is the toxicity if it reaches healthy tissue.
Kernal’s founding observation, as Erkul told Fierce Biotech in 2020, is that cancer ribosomes use what he called a slightly different language. Encode the instruction in that dialect and a healthy cell reading another one degrades it. The company calls this mRNA 2.0 and sets it against the mRNA 1.0 of Moderna, BioNTech and CureVac.
Selectivity is half the job. Lipid nanoparticles, the standard delivery vehicle, drift to the liver. Kernal says it coats its particles with antibodies so they reach T cells, spleen and bone marrow instead. Two checks: the particle decides where the message lands, the sequence decides where it is read.
That pointed somewhere unexpected. Approved CAR T therapies work, and they are brutal logistics: a patient’s T cells are harvested, engineered in a facility, and infused back weeks later after chemotherapy clears room. Kernal’s pitch is to skip all of it and program the T cells where they are.
A doctor who ran out of things to say
Erkul won a silver medal at the International Biology Olympiad as a teenager in Turkey, started medical school at Hacettepe, switched to MIT for biology, then spent three years on oncology drug discovery at Merck before finishing his medical degree. The turn came in his internship.
“I once had to very closely follow a terminal lung cancer patient in ICU, who hadn’t responded to any of the treatments, and I have never felt so remorseful and helpless as a human being,” he told a Boston interviewer in 2018.
He founded Kernal in 2016 with Burak Yilmaz, a synthetic biologist he met at MIT and whose earlier company, Sentegen, made synthetic DNA and diagnostic probes. Two more co-founders sit in the early record: Catherine Moroski, an officer and director on the 2016 SEC filing, and Cafer Ozdemir, who also goes by Jeff Ozdemir and heads the computational platform. Manfred Kraus, formerly of Pfizer and Bristol Myers Squibb, joined in 2022 to lead R&D.
Ten years, three lead candidates
Amgen gave Kernal a Golden Ticket at LabCentral in December 2017 and again a year later. In October 2018 Boeing and the ISS National Lab picked it for a Technology in Space award through MassChallenge, part of up to $500,000 across three startups. Y Combinator took it into the Summer 2020 batch, and a $10.5 million seed round led by Hummingbird Ventures closed in early 2021.
At the 2021 International mRNA Health Conference the lead asset was KR-333, an mRNA cocktail shown in posters to shrink tumors in mice resistant to anti-PD1 drugs. By July 2022, when Hummingbird led a $25 million Series A with Amgen Ventures, HBM Genomics and Civilization Ventures, the release named a different candidate: the money would “support the filing of an IND for Kernal’s immuno-oncology candidate KR-335.”
By September 2024 the decks led with a third name. KR-402 delivers CAR-encoding mRNA to T cells inside the body, and the company reported B cell depletion within a week in mice. In October 2025 ARPA-H picked KR-402 for its EMBODY program, an award of up to $48 million shared with Stanford Medicine, Dana-Farber and the Jackson Laboratory. Days earlier Kernal moved into Lilly Gateway Labs in Boston. In May 2026 it presented at ASGCT. KR-335 has not appeared in a release since 2024, though it survives on the careers page.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Registered trials | None. ClinicalTrials.gov searches on Sep 22, 2026 for Kernal Biologics, KR-402 and KR-335 return no company-sponsored study. | Not found |
| IND status | The July 2022 release said the Series A would “support the filing of an IND for Kernal’s immuno-oncology candidate KR-335.” No IND has been announced since, and KR-335 is no longer the lead. | Claim outran the record |
| Development stage | Kernal’s own BIO International Convention 2026 listing, dated June 24, 2026, gives lead product KR-402, phase “Pre-Clinical,” next catalyst December 2026. | Company-stated |
| Peer-reviewed papers | A PubMed search on Sep 22, 2026 finds no indexed article with a Kernal Biologics affiliation. | Not found |
| ARPA-H award | Announced Oct 7, 2025: “up to $48 million in funding by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.” EMBODY program, led by Daria Fedyukina. Sub-awardees: Stanford Medicine, Dana-Farber, the Jackson Laboratory. Share not disclosed. | Public record |
| SEC filings | Three Form D notices, CIK 0001684728: Sep 2016 ($350,000, 2 investors), Aug 2018 ($500,000 of $1,000,000, 1 investor), Feb 2022 ($20,081,970 of $25,471,668, 53 investors). | Public record |
| Other federal grants | No NIH or NSF award to Kernal Biologics appears in the grant records assembled for this profile. ARPA-H is its first documented federal research grant. | Not found |
| “Backed by NASA” | Kernal calls itself “backed by investors like Hummingbird Ventures, Amgen Ventures, and NASA.” The ISS National Lab is “managed by the Center for the Advancement for Science in Space, under agreement with NASA.” Its 2018 award was grant and hardware support, not equity. | Differs from the record |
| KR-402 data | More than 90% in vivo delivery with T cell targeted particles; B cell depletion within days of one dose in mice; up to 40-fold selective translation in vitro. Shown at ASGCT 2026, not replicated or published. | Company-stated |
| KR-335 claims | It “boasts a 100x therapeutic index, showing high efficacy in solid tumors resistant to conventional immuno-oncology agents.” “It demonstrated strong tolerability in preclinical models, including mice and non-human primates.” Absent from every release since 2024. | Company-stated |
Read plainly: the science has a coherent logic and a serious federal funder has bought into it. What does not yet exist is a dosed patient, a filed IND, or one number published where other scientists can check it. Every efficacy figure here traces to a poster or a press release, and the promise of clinical trials, made in 2020 and paid for in 2022, has moved with each new lead candidate.
What to watch
- An IND for KR-402. It would be the company’s first in ten years.
- December 2026, the catalyst date given to BIO.
- Whether KR-402 data reaches peer review rather than a conference hall.
- Whether ARPA-H pays out near $48 million or stops early. It is a ceiling across four organizations.
- Whether KR-335 returns to the pipeline.
- A new Form D. The last one was filed in February 2022.
In their words
“I once had to very closely follow a terminal lung cancer patient in ICU, who hadn’t responded to any of the treatments, and I have never felt so remorseful and helpless as a human being.”
Yusuf Erkul, co-founder and CEO, Boston Voyager, 2018 · Interview
“In cancer cells, ribosomes actually read the message and, as you might guess, we have an interesting message for cancer cells, which pretty much tells them to go kill themselves.”
Yusuf Erkul, Fierce Biotech, October 2020 · Independent
“Before we go into hundreds and thousands of patients, we are doing our homework in various model systems to push forward the best horse we have.”
Yusuf Erkul, Fierce Biotech, October 2020 · Independent
“We are very grateful to our investors and are making exciting progress toward our goal of clinical trials in humans.”
Yusuf Erkul, company release, July 2021 · Company release
“Current CAR-T therapies heralded a true revolution in cancer treatment. Yet, they have their limitations, including a three-week vein-to-vein turnaround time, tumor resistance leading to relapse, and side effects such as cytokine release syndrome or secondary T-cell malignancies.”
Yusuf Erkul, ARPA-H award release, October 2025 · Company release
“By programming T cells in situ, we’re breaking the logistical and toxicological barriers that have kept CAR T therapies out of reach for the vast majority of patients.”
Burak Yilmaz, co-founder and president, ASGCT 2026 release · Company release
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D filings, CIK 0001684728
- Public recordClinicalTrials.gov and PubMed searches: Kernal Biologics, KR-402, KR-335
- Public recordEMBODY program page
- Public recordBoeing and the ISS National Lab award $500,000 through MassChallenge
- IndependentNow meet Kernal Bio, the startup working on mRNA 2.0
- IndependentAmgen-backed Kernal Biologics pops off with $25M
- IndependentUS government earmarks up to $48M for Kernal’s mRNA CAR-T
- IndependentAmgen LabCentral Golden Ticket announcements
- InterviewMeet Yusuf Erkul of Kernal Biologics
- Company$25M Series A financing release
- CompanyAwarded up to $48 million from ARPA-H
- CompanyASGCT 2026 presentations release
- CompanyKernal Biologics enters development phase
- CompanyKernal Biologics website and Y Combinator profile
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
