Nava Therapeutics has spent the last four years working quietly on a problem that’s tripped up a lot of gene therapy companies: how to get genetic medicine into the body without using a virus, and without getting stuck in the liver. The company just went public with its progress, telling Endpoints News it has raised $89 million total, and revealing a platform aimed at delivering lipid nanoparticles to the immune cells, and, notably, the kidney , an organ that’s remained largely out of reach for genetic medicine.
Why a Virus Veteran Bet on a Different Delivery System
Nava is led by Federico Mingozzi, the former chief science and technology officer of Spark Therapeutics,the first company to win FDA approval of a gene therapy for a genetic disease. Spark’s treatment relied on engineered viruses to deliver DNA, an approach that’s still dealing with safety concerns and expensive manufacturing nearly a decade later. “I’ve seen the limitations of it,” Mingozzi said.
That history is exactly why his move to lipid nanoparticles, or LNPs, is notable. LNPs have mostly proven themselves in two narrow lanes: as local injections for vaccines, and as infusions that end up in the liver, which acts like a sink for most nanoparticles regardless of where you’re trying to send them. Getting an LNP anywhere else in the body has been one of the harder unsolved problems in genetic medicine.
Nava was founded in 2022 to go after exactly that, building and screening new libraries of lipids designed to escape the liver and reach other organs. GV, formerly Google Ventures, recruited Mingozzi to lead the company in late 2023. “The investors wanted to build the next big player in the delivery space,” he said. “I was a little bit scared by the idea of moving away from the virus, but very attracted by the idea.” The company started with a $10 million seed round, followed by a previously undisclosed $79 million Series A in 2024, bringing in investors including GV, Andreessen Horowitz, Versant Ventures, F-Prime Capital, Readout Capital, and Alexandria Venture Investments.
Two Programs Built on the Same Secret Ingredient
Nava’s most advanced program is entering one of biotech’s most crowded fields: in vivo CAR-T, where more than 100 companies are racing to replace externally engineered cell therapies with a simple infusion that reprograms T cells inside the body. Mingozzi isn’t worried about being late. “I don’t think there’s a clear winner,” he said. “It’s still an open space when it comes to a product that is optimally designed.” Nava is targeting a first clinical trial in autoimmune disease in the first half of 2027, and at the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy meeting in May, the company shared mouse and monkey data showing full B cell depletion after two low doses of its in vivo CAR-T candidate.
The second program is the one that could actually break new ground: an LNP designed to reach the kidney, an organ that’s been essentially off-limits to genetic medicine. Nava has shown it can deliver nanoparticles to podocytes and tubular cells in mice and monkeys given standard IV infusions, though Mingozzi admits the company doesn’t yet fully understand the mechanism behind it. “How the LNP gets there, that’s an interesting question,” he said. “We are still working on the actual underlying mechanisms.” He wouldn’t name specific kidney diseases the company is targeting, but described the ambition as one-and-done curative treatments, including gene editing, for both rare and common kidney conditions.
Both programs trace back to the same core innovation: the ionizable lipid, one of four components in an LNP, which holds the mRNA payload together and largely determines where in the body the particle travels. Mingozzi says Nava’s ionizable lipids are built from scratch rather than adapted from existing IP, avoiding both the liver-trapping tendencies of older formulations and the patent disputes that have entangled other LNP companies. “The secret sauce of Nava is the ionizable lipids,” he said. “We did something completely new.” He’s cagey about the actual chemistry, and freely admits the broader challenge: “Making LNPs is not original. But the devil is in the details. And in a landscape of not being original, there’s a lot of details that can bring you to success or not.”
The company traces its scientific roots to the lab of Georgia Tech bioengineer James Dahlman, whose multiplexed nanoparticle-screening methods also spun out a separate startup, Guide Therapeutics, acquired by Beam Therapeutics for $120 million in stock in 2021. Nava, co-founded by Dahlman along with former postdocs Kalina Paunovska and Curtis Dobrowolski, followed a year later, though Mingozzi says the company’s current work has moved well beyond those original multiplexing studies. Spark co-founder Jeff Marrazzo now sits on Nava’s board.
The Road Ahead
Nava currently runs about 40 employees across two sites, a Cambridge, Massachusetts team handling LNP discovery, screening, and manufacturing, and a smaller Philadelphia team focused on the in vivo CAR-T program. Mingozzi wouldn’t say how long the current funding will carry the company or whether it covers a full early-stage clinical trial. That’s a real open question for a company this early, but it’s also standard for a platform still proving itself against more than a hundred competitors. What makes Nava worth tracking isn’t just the CAR-T race everyone’s already in. It’s the kidney program, which, if it works, would open a genetic medicine door that’s stayed shut for the entire field so far.
