BIO 2025: Finding the Right Partner for Innovation

In BioPharm International®’s continuing conversation with Ram Aiyar, PhD, of Korro Bio, the company’s CEO and president discusses the work Korro has been doing on RNA editing for a wide range of targets, and how that research and knowledge can be brought to a wider audience of potential patients with the assistance of a major player in the biopharmaceutical industry.

“That's where pharma companies really come into the picture, where it's like they are more interested. They have the machinery; they have the sales force; they have the ability to reach millions of patients that we can't as a small company. And so, collaborating with pharma companies on indications that are very large is a perfect match,” Aiyar says in the interview. “In our case, we're working with Novo Nordisk. We're working with them on two targets in large patient populations. And that bridges the gap where novel technology matched with resources really brings the ability to bring some of these drugs that will take a very long time to get a large patient population in a much, much faster way.”

Aiyar is expanding on this conversation as one of the speakers in a session at BIO 2025 entitled “Cracking the Code: Effective Biotech and Pharma Partnerships Unveiled,” on Tuesday, June 17.

Korro Bio’s Chief Medical Officer Kemi Olugemo, MD, is also representing the company on June 17 in another presentation at BIO 2025, “Innovative Patient-Focused Models for Accelerating Rare Drug Development.”

Click the above video for Part 2 of our interview with Ram Aiyar. Click here for Part 1.

Click here for all of our BIO 2025 coverage.

*Scroll below for a full transcript of the video.

About the speaker

Ram Aiyar, PhD, is CEO and president at Korro Bio.

Transcript

Editor's note: This transcript is a direct, unedited rendering of the original audio/video content. It may contain errors, informal language, or omissions as spoken in the original recording.

Hi, I'm Ram Aiyar, CEO of Korro Bio.

We live in a world where there's two sides of the coin in terms of how patients are affected. You have rare genetic diseases, where you understand the genetic cause of a disease and you can go in and fix it, whether changing DNA or modifying RNA or actually coming on top of something else, these are indications and diseases that biotechs can actually work on because the amount of dollars needed to get a drug all the way through is actually pretty significant.

The higher the number of patients that are affected by a disease, the greater that number, and in a capital efficient manner, in an environment where money is hard to find, biotechs can only focus on areas where they can have the most bang for their buck. So that's where I think when you think about a biotech company's focus, it's in indications where they can commercialize and control their destiny.

It's a moment in time when you have success for one of those drugs, then you can start expanding into larger patient populations. And so for Korro, that's always been the case, which is like we start our foundation to make sure that, the drug works in patients who are lead candidates in rare disease.

And we are repairing the protein, we're in the clinic, we'll have data in the second half of this year, so waiting to see how that pans out, but our aspirations are to go and treat millions of patients because we think that this technology can help a lot, but we can't do that right now.

And so that's where pharma companies really come into the picture, where it's like they are more interested. They have the machinery, they have the sales force, they have the ability to reach millions of patients that we can't as a small company. And so collaborating with pharma companies on indications that are very large is a perfect match.

So in our case, we're working with Novo Nordisk. we're working with them on two targets in large patient populations. And that bridges the gap where novel technology matched with resources really brings the ability to bring some of these drugs that will take a very long time to get a large patient population in a much, much faster way.

So I think that's where the match really lies when you marry large companies with small biotechs working innovatively and nimbly to see how there's synergies to bring these medicines forward.

BIO has always been one of those conferences where it's like confluence of various types of individuals, whether it's state entities all the way through innovative biotech companies as well as investors, policymakers, pharma. So it's a confluence of a lot of different people together.

So it's always been a place where you can interact with a diverse set of individuals under one umbrella. Just in general, seeing and meeting colleagues, friends, members of the healthcare community, I think is a great place to do at BIO specifically for me and for Korro.

We have our lead program that's in the clinic. We've said publicly as a public company that we will have clinical data in the second half of this year. We have the potential to show that it's a best in class. So setting the stage for, what that looks like, networking with people, giving them a perspective of the timing of when that drug and data release is gonna be.

What our second asset is gonna look like. This provides a venue to be able to really do that in a way that you can't do otherwise. I'm really excited about the panel presentation at BIO that I'm sharing with a bunch of colleagues, both from large pharma as well as from, the venture community.

We hope to have a very intimate discussion on what a good partnership looks like, how the stakeholders come together, what eventually leads to a good, successful outcome through that partnership. And so I'm really looking forward to sharing some of the things that we've learned through the current collaboration that we have at Nova Nordisk, as well as our prior experience, working in the healthcare sector for over two decades.

Really looking forward to BIO for those multiple reasons. And, look forward to connecting with a lot of stakeholders within the value chain.