Biotech · Gene therapy manufacturing
Perception Biosystems
A Y Combinator company that set out to build a robotic lab so a rare disease gene therapy could be made faster and far more cheaply. It left almost no public record, and it is listed as inactive.
Four questions on a homepage
In August 2020 the Perception Biosystems homepage asked four questions in a row, stacked one under the other like a doctor taking a history.
“Are you in a long waiting list for AAV?” “Are you nervous about cost?” “Do you need cGMP material?” “Are you anxious about study delays?”
Anyone who had tried to move an ultra rare disease gene therapy from a university bench into a first human trial would have answered yes four times. The contact page had one button on it. It read: Request An Invitation.
That was the proposition. Not a new vector, not a new target. A factory that behaved like software.
The number the pitch was built on
Gene therapy prices are the headline, and manufacturing is the reason. A 2023 Roland Berger analysis put it in one line: “Manufacturing is the main cost driver.” The same report noted that therapies “can cost as much as USD3.5 million a dose, as is the case for Hemgenix,” a one time infusion for hemophilia B.
Work the arithmetic the report lays out and it gets concrete. AAV batches are often capped near 500 litres. A 500 litre batch of Hemgenix vector, by Roland Berger's calculation, yields enough for two or three adult patients at USD3 to 7 million per batch, so vector manufacturing alone can run USD1 to 2 million per dose. Between 70 and 80 percent of that work is outsourced during early development, which is why the queue for a contract slot is real.
For a disease with a few hundred patients in the world, that structure is fatal. The cost of the first clinical batch does not fall because the population is small. Perception's claim, in its own words, was that a robotic lab could produce clinical material “an order of magnitude faster and cheaper than the current solution,” opening thousands of targets otherwise thought too rare to pursue.
A virologist, a reproducibility campaigner and a vector engineer
Omid Karkouti founded the company and ran it. His bio described more than ten years in the life sciences and a master's degree in molecular virology from Baylor College of Medicine. The about page framed the motive plainly: “As a rare disease patient advocate, Omid founded Perception to create scalable infrastructure that enables the development of gene therapies for thousands of previously untreatable genetic diseases.”
The co-founder and board director was Elizabeth Iorns, who founded and ran Science Exchange, co-directed the Reproducibility Initiative, and was a part-time partner at Y Combinator leading its biotech practice. Nature named her one of its ten people who mattered in 2012.
The science came from Leszek Lisowski, the founding scientist: a postdoc with Mark Kay at Stanford on AAV evolution, then head of the Salk Institute's vector facility, co-founder of LogicBio Therapeutics, and from October 2015 the builder of the Vector and Genome Engineering Facility at Children's Medical Research Institute in Sydney. Johnny Chan was chief operating officer and co-founder, Michael Keherly head of quality. The mission line never changed: “To accelerate the clinical translation of gene therapy by reinventing its development and manufacturing.”
Boston, March 2019
There is exactly one independent trace of the company in the wild, and it is a photo caption.
On March 25, 2019, Odylia Therapeutics convened the first meeting of its Gene Therapy Pre-Competitive Consortium at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear campus in Boston, to work out how ultra rare gene therapies could reach trials faster and more cheaply. The caption lists Karkouti in the room, under the name Perception Therapeutics, next to people from the FDA, Lonza, Spark Therapeutics, Roche, Charles River, Aldevron and the NIH's NCATS. That is the correct room for this problem, and the company was in it.
Then nothing
The Internet Archive holds captures of perception.bio from September 18, 2019. The last full capture of the company site is August 14, 2020. On September 17, 2020 the root returned a 403, and it kept returning 403 through 2021. On April 10, 2022 the address returned an HTTP 301 and redirected to an unrelated software site. The domain is now listed for sale.
PitchBook's timeline runs the same way: an accelerator deal on August 22, 2018, a private secondary transaction on December 1, 2021, and an out of business event dated February 8, 2022. Headcount at last count: two. Y Combinator lists the company as inactive.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| FDA records | No 510(k) and no premarket approval under the company name, checked Sep 24, 2026. A contract manufacturer need not have one. | Public record |
| Clinical trials | No registered trial lists the company as sponsor or collaborator. | Public record |
| Federal grants | No NIH award. An NSF sweep returned 25 keyword matches, every one to a different firm. For a company pitching cheaper manufacturing for rare disease, a missing SBIR award is the loudest silence in the file. | Public record |
| Peer-reviewed papers | No PubMed hits for the company name. | Not found |
| Patents | A Google Patents query on the company name returned no results on Sep 24, 2026. | Not found |
| SEC filings | EDGAR full text search returns zero documents for Perception Biosystems, Perception Bio, Inc and Reformer Therapeutics. No Form D was ever filed. | Public record |
| The robotic lab | Described by the company as being built in the SF Bay Area. No facility address, no photograph, no equipment vendor, no named customer, no independent confirmation. | Company-stated |
| Industry participation | Karkouti is named in the photo caption of the inaugural Odylia consortium, Boston, Mar 25, 2019, listed as Perception Therapeutics. | Independent |
| Operating status | Inactive on Y Combinator. PitchBook records two employees, $120,000 raised to date, and an out of business event dated Feb 8, 2022. | Data provider |
| Identity in databases | Crunchbase serves the profile from an address ending in reformer-therapeutics, PitchBook describes a cancer therapeutics developer, and RocketReach opens with a sentence about Reformer Therapeutics, an immuno-oncology company in Palo Alto. None of it matches the gene therapy manufacturer on the company's own site. | Differs from company description |
| Website | Captures run Sep 18, 2019 to Aug 14, 2020, then 403 responses, then an HTTP 301 to an unrelated site on Apr 10, 2022. The domain is now for sale. | Public record |
Read plainly: the thesis was sound, the people were real, and the evidence stops at the pitch. There is no regulator file, no grant, no paper, no patent and no securities filing. The single independent sighting of the company operating is a caption from a meeting in Boston in March 2019. What Perception proposed is still the right problem. The record shows only that this company did not get far enough to be measured against it.
What to watch
- Whether any Form D ever appears under Reformer Therapeutics, the name now attached to the Perception Biosystems database entries. None exists today.
- Whether the automation thesis reappears under a new company. The people who held it are still working in the field.
- Whether the commercial databases separate the two businesses now sharing one set of records.
- Whether small batch, automated AAV production draws capital again. Gene therapy and gene editing developers raised under $1.4 billion across 39 venture rounds in 2024, against $8.2 billion across 122 deals at the 2021 peak, per DealForma data reported by Reuters.
In their words
“Current technology that could be used to treat many rare genetic diseases is held back by slow infrastructure. We're building the tools to power the next thousand cures.”
Omid Karkouti, MS, founder and CEO, company website, 2020 · Company
“We're building a robotic lab in the SF Bay Area to translate the large facilities, labor, and regulatory requirements of current gene therapy factories into automated flexible manufacturing systems and code.”
Perception Biosystems, Y Combinator company page · Company
“Our team has deep expertise in laboratory automation and virology, as well as industry experience that spans viral vector research, manufacturing, therapeutic development, and regulatory affairs.”
Perception Biosystems, team page, 2020 · Company
“A system of procurement that saves money and save time, so that you can save lives.”
Perception Biosystems, rare genetic disease services page, 2019 · Company
“There is no one-size-fits-all vector and each has its own manufacturing process.”
Morris Hosseini and Stephan Fath, Roland Berger, 2023 · Independent
“We're largely seeing investments shifting to things that are de-risked.”
Jon Norris, managing director, HSBC Innovation Banking, to BioPharma Dive, 2024 · Independent
“There needs to be better ways, cheaper ways to make some of these complex products.”
Subin Baral, global life sciences deal leader, Ernst & Young, to Reuters, 2025 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordPublic record sweep: FDA, ClinicalTrials.gov, NIH RePORTER, NSF, PubMed and SEC Form D
- Public recordSEC EDGAR full text search, zero filings for the company or its later name
- Public recordCapture index and stored captures for perception.bio, 2019 to 2026
- Public recordGoogle Patents query on the company name, no results
- CompanyPerception Biosystems company page, showing S18 and Inactive
- CompanyPerception Biosystems, About Us
- CompanyPerception Bio home page with founder statement
- IndependentOdylia holds inaugural Gene Therapy Pre-Competitive Consortium, with attendee caption
- Data providerPerception Biosystems profile: founding year, status, headcount, deal history
- Data providerPerception Biosystems company information
- IndependentLeszek Lisowski, Unit Head, Translational Vectorology Unit
- IndependentCutting the cost of gene therapy manufacturing
- IndependentGene therapy loses luster as investors eye quicker returns from weight-loss drugs
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
