Base to Base biotech podcast 65: Giving medicine a genetic camouflage

This week, we have a conversation with Houdini Bio CEO and co-founder Jonathan Cohen-Gold.Houdini Bio has announced its official launch, having raised approximately £1.5m in non-dilutive grant funding and capital from an oversubscribed pre-seed round.The funding enables Houdini Bio to validate its technology and achieve projected technical milestones in a third of the predicted time. The platform- a machine learning-guided DNA sequence design infrastructure- is engineered to overcome the biological barriers limiting genetic medicines.Positioned for rapid commercial scaling ahead of its next funding round, Houdini Bio provides the infrastructure required to make genetic medicines work durably, consistently and cost-efficiently at scale- transforming outcomes for patients suffering from blindness, cystic fibrosis, haemophilia, dementia, cancer and more.While gene and cell therapies are progressing rapidly, their real-world impact is held back by a fundamental biological hurdle: the human cell often mistakes therapeutic DNA for a viral invader. To protect itself, the cell triggers natural defences that 'silence' the medicine. This premature shutdown limits the treatment's long-term effectiveness, drives up manufacturing costs and demands high doses which can cause dangerous immune reactions in patients. Current industry attempts to keep these therapies active rely on trial-and-error experimentation, which is slow, costly and unreliable.Houdini Bio solves this problem at the level of the genetic code itself. By combining machine learning with a deep understanding of cellular defences- specifically a master silencing mechanism known as the human silencing hub (HUSH) complex - Houdini Bio has created a toolkit to re-engineer therapeutic DNA.This gives the medicine a genetic camouflage, preserving its medical purpose while making it invisible to the cell's defences. The platform uses advanced sequence design to reliably boost gene expression output by more than 10-fold compared to current state-of-the-art methods, ensuring therapies work more efficiently, at lower doses, for longer.The company's foundational science bridges academic discovery and industrial application. The HUSH complex was originally discovered by Paul Lehner at the University of Cambridge, who identified how the body silences foreign genetic material. Building on this breakthrough during his PhD in molecular genetics, Houdini Bio CEO and co-founder Jonathan Cohen-Gold discovered a novel set of molecular rules that allow certain DNA sequences to escape this cellular lock-down. Houdini Bio has accelerated these insights using AI, building an engineering platform that paves the way for more affordable, durable gene therapies and cell therapies like CAR-T.To drive its commercial strategy, Cohen-Gold is joined by co-founder and chief business officer Lee Dunham. Having worked with more than 100 cell and gene therapy companies over the past decade- including as a director of business development at Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult- Dunham has seen first-hand why promising therapies stall, founding Houdini Bio after recognising its unique ability to solve a huge industry challenge.With its platform fully validated ahead of schedule, the company will maintain momentum to expand its team and scale co-development partnerships with pharma companies, deep tech innovators and pioneering developers looking to integrate anti-silencing technology into next-generation drug pipelines.To get in touch with guest suggestions, or to sponsor or advertise on the podcast, please email [email protected]