There’s innovation, and then there’s what ImmunoVec just pulled off, a $40.7M federal award from ARPA-H’s EMBODY program to literally reprogram immune cells inside the body. Not culture dishes, not petri dreams. Inside. The. Body. That’s not a biotech announcement; that’s a line in the sand for how medicine’s about to operate.
Co-founder & CEO Ryan Wong, Ph.D., Co-founder & Director of Cell Therapy Luke Riggan, Ph.D., and Chairman William Woodward of Anthem Venture Partners have been playing the long game since 2019, and now it’s hitting ignition. Their LA-based startup isn’t interested in chasing yesterday’s breakthroughs. ImmunoVec is building a polymeric nanoparticle system that delivers DNA payloads to exact immune cells with surgical precision, reprogramming them without ever removing them from the body.
While others are still tied up in the cost and chaos of ex vivo cell therapy, ImmunoVec is showing how chemistry, coding, and courage fuse into something faster, cleaner, and more scalable. Their in vivo platform has already proven durable gene expression in preclinical models for autoimmune and pediatric immune disorders like X-linked chronic granulomatous disease, Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome, and IPEX syndrome. Add Johns Hopkins University and MD Anderson Cancer Center to the mix, and you’ve got validation from institutions that don’t waste their time.
This $40.7M isn’t just a grant, it’s a green light from the federal brain trust that believes in ImmunoVec’s vision of reprogramming the immune system like software. The team’s now moving toward IND-enabling studies and scaling manufacturing through UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute, setting up for their first in-human trial.
Every generation of biotech births a new language, CRISPR spoke one, mRNA another. ImmunoVec might be crafting the next dialect, one built on precision DNA delivery, scalable manufacturing, and single-dose treatments that actually stick. If they succeed, the immune system won’t just fight disease, it’ll learn, adapt, and heal from within.
