Inside Kyverna

Transforming the Practice of Medicine for Autoimmune Disease

Our Story

Based in Berkeley, California, Kyverna was founded in 2018 by Chief Scientific Officer, Jeffrey Greve, Ph.D., and venture capitalists Fred Cohen and Beth Seidenberg. The company’s founding premise was that advances in cell engineering to create successful therapies for cancer could be applied to autoimmune disease, where there are a vast number of diseases that are not adequately treated by currently available therapies.

In January 2020, the company announced a $25M Series A investment from Vida Ventures, Westlake Partners, and Gilead. At this time, the company named industry veteran Dominic Borie, MD., Ph.D., an accomplished immunologist, digestive tract and liver transplant surgeon with extensive drug development experience from Genentech, Roche and Amgen, as the company’s Chief Executive Officer. Kyverna also announced it had entered into a strategic collaboration and license agreement with Gilead to develop engineered T cell therapies for the treatment of autoimmune disease based on Kyverna’s synthetic regulatory T cell platform and synNotch technology from Kite, a Gilead company.

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Cell therapy represents a sophisticated approach to treating autoimmune disease without requiring extreme procedures such as bone marrow or stem cell transplants. Instead of taking medicine orally or injecting it, this new type of autologous therapy involves taking cells out of the body, engineering them and reinfusing them to correct an identified defective or pathogenic mechanism. This therapeutic approach could help restore balance to the patient’s immune system.

Kyverna’s overall goal is to make a significant and transformational impact to the lives of patients under the siege of autoimmune disease. This may be achieved through the use of select cell therapy approaches affording sustained therapeutic benefit from a single, or relatively few, infusion(s) and eliminating the need for chronic and suboptimal therapies.

Our Philosophy

Great minds don’t always think alike.

We’ve turned this universal truth into a guiding principle at Kyverna, where we are building a multi-disciplinary team that translates industry experience and academic exuberance into scientific excellence. As leaders, we are committed to fostering a collegial, collaborative and open environment where we welcome and nurture “science of all minds” to help fulfill the promise of developing transformative cell therapies for patients with autoimmune disease.

Leadership Team

Image for Dominic Borie, MD, PhD
Dominic Borie, MD, PhD

Chief Executive Officer

Image for Jeffrey Greve, PhD
Jeffrey Greve, PhD

Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer

Image for Karen Walker
Karen Walker

Chief Technology Officer

Image for James Chung, MD, PhD
James Chung, MD, PhD

Chief Medical Officer

Image for Julie Winter, MBA
Julie Winter, MBA

Vice President, Business Development

Image for Gregory J. Giotta, PhD, JD
Gregory J. Giotta, PhD, JD

Chief Legal Counsel

Image for Ryan Jones, MBA
Ryan Jones, MBA

Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Finance

Board of Directors

Image for Beth Seidenberg, MD
Beth Seidenberg, MD

Founding Managing Director, Westlake Village BioPartners; General Partner, Kleiner Perkins

Image for Fred Cohen, MD
Fred Cohen, MD

Co-Founder and Sr. Managing Director at Vida Ventures

Image for Desmond Padhi, BSc, PharmD
Desmond Padhi, BSc, PharmD

Principal, Westlake Village BioPartners

Image for Brian Kotzin, MD
Brian Kotzin, MD

Independent Director

Image for Mark C. Genovese, MD
Mark C. Genovese, MD

SVP for Inflammation Clinical Research at Gilead Science

Image for Heba Nowyhed, PhD
Heba Nowyhed, PhD

Senior Associate, Vida Ventures

Image for Dominic Borie, MD, PhD
Dominic Borie, MD, PhD

Chief Executive Officer

Image for Ian Clark
Ian Clark

Chairman of the Board

Scientific Advisors

Image for Ignacio Sanz, MD
Ignacio Sanz, MD

Mason I. Lowance Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics, Chief of the Division of Rheumatology, and Director of the Lowance Center for Human Immunology at Emory University

Image for Christophe Benoist M.D., PhD
Christophe Benoist M.D., PhD

Morton Grove-Rasmussen Chair in Immunohematology at Harvard Medical School

Image for Eugene C. Butcher, M.D.
Eugene C. Butcher, M.D.

Klaus Bensch Professor of Pathology at Stanford

Join Our Team

If you are a thoughtful risk-taker, team player and swing-for-the-fences kind of person, we may have a role for you!
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