Curiosity, Research, and Translation: The MIT Roots of Kelonia Therapeutics
Featured in September 2026 newsletter
When Michael Birnbaum’s lab began developing a new way to track what T cells recognize, the goal was not to start a company. Long before the company he co-founded, Kelonia Therapeutics, was acquired by Eli Lilly and Company in April 2026, Birnbaum sought to answer a fundamental immunology question about measurement. As he followed the science, the technology suggested a much broader possibility for the treatment of cancers.
Birnbaum, the Underwood-Prescott Professor of Biological Engineering, explains Kelonia’s success by pointing to a long chain of factors rooted at MIT: a bold student, early internal funding, federal research support, and a culture willing to take ambitious ideas seriously before their applications are obvious.
Birnbaum, who is also a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, began his curiosity-driven research to better understand how T cells, white blood cells that are part of the body’s immune defense, recognized their targets, immune intruders like tumors that are called antigens.
Working with graduate student Connor Dobson, Birnbaum’s lab used lentiviral vectors – basically delivery vehicles for genetic material – as a precise tool to identify, barcode, and track specific cells to study immune cell interactions.
The tools the lab produced suggested a larger possibility: if a lentiviral vector could be targeted well enough to record what a cell was doing, perhaps it could also deliver therapeutic instructions to reprogram what that cell could do.
That idea became the foundation for Kelonia, which eventually focused on developing targeted genetic medicines that aim to engineer cells inside the body, including by generating therapeutic CAR-T cells in patients rather than manufacturing them externally and administering them through infusion.
Incubating discovery
Breakthrough translation, like Kelonia’s, depended on more than any single discovery.
Birnbaum credits MIT with providing an environment where openness, rigor, and risk-taking are encouraged and rewarded. The success of his work depended on a setting where bold ideas could be discussed early, challenged seriously, and supported when they showed promise.
“The culture at MIT is amazing. It is a really unusual combination of being quite supportive—I never had to be cautious about sharing my work or ideas—while also being incredibly rigorous and incredibly open to risk,” said Birnbaum. “Those three together, combined with the resources of MIT and the brilliant students, are really special.”
The project was initially supported by the Koch Institute’s Frontier Research Program. Subsequent funding came from the U.S. Department of Defense, which sponsored work on tracking emerging infectious diseases, and from the National Institutes of Health.
Birnbaum also highlighted the importance of MIT’s ability to build bridges between science and engineering and external partners like hospitals and industry. Each step helped sustain the research long enough for its broader potential to emerge.
Birnbaum also highlighted the importance of MIT’s ability to build bridges between science and engineering and external partners like hospitals and industry.
Each step helped sustain the research long enough for its broader potential to emerge.
“If one link in the chain weren’t there, we probably wouldn’t be here right now,” he said.
“If one link in the chain weren’t there, we probably wouldn’t be here right now.”
Looking back, Birnbaum says he learned to seek advice and share ideas early and often. Keeping his focus on solutions all along the way, he leaned into the data, followed the science, and learned how to work under uncertainty – both scientific and financial.
“Solving problems is primary and starting companies is secondary,” he said.
From tracking to reprogramming T cells
The original idea began to emerge in 2017, during Birnbaum’s first years at MIT, when he was focused on T-cell biology. He and Dobson began to use repurposed lentiviruses to create a durable record of interactions between immune cells and their targets, specifically tracking T-cell receptors and their respective target antigens simultaneously and at a large scale.
The goal was not initially therapeutic. It was to create a better experimental system — a way to observe immune-cell recognition with greater specificity and permanence. Dobson helped turn that concept into a functioning system, and Birnbaum’s lab later published findings on the technology and continued using related approaches to study immune-cell interactions. Only later did the therapeutic potential become clear: genetic cargoes were capable of reprogramming cells directly inside the body.
Traditional CAR-T therapies transformed treatment for some blood cancers by removing a patient’s T cells from the body, genetically engineering them in a manufacturing facility, and then infusing them back into the patient. The therapy can be highly effective, but the process is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to scale.
Kelonia’s approach simplifies that process. It focuses first on multiple myeloma, for which CAR-T therapies already had a strong clinical rationale. That choice reduced one major category of risk, since the therapeutic mechanism was already known to be effective. The remaining question was whether Kelonia’s delivery platform could create those same cells in vivo safely and efficiently.
Risk, conviction, and the leap to a company
While the science progressed, Birnbaum said the idea to found a company happened as a result of a chance meeting with investor Bryan Roberts, a partner at venture capital firm Venrock. Birnbaum was not actively trying to start a company and thought that, even if it was a possibility, it was a distant one. Birnbaum made it clear to Roberts that his ideas were risky.
“He told me I was so bad at pitching that I was almost good at it. I traded polish for authenticity,” said Birnbaum, who provided investors with a candid assessment of the challenges.
The technology was promising, but the idea of reprogramming cells directly inside the body presented challenges related to the science, safety, delivery, and implementation.
To take on these challenges, Birnbaum co-founded Kelonia with Kevin Friedman and Molly Perkins, leaders with experience in CAR-T development. Dobson later joined the company after completing his PhD at MIT. Together, they began developing the scientific idea into a therapeutic strategy.
For Birnbaum, the process was both exciting and anxiety-provoking. He was conscious that people were making major career and financial decisions based on an idea begun in his lab.
“The part that kept me up at night was the people and money risk,” said Birnbaum. “If it failed, that had real consequences for them.”
Curiosity sparks innovation and collaboration
Birnbaum describes himself as trained as a scientist but working as an engineer. At MIT, he found an environment where those identities could productively overlap.
“There really are differences in how a scientist typically thinks and how an engineer thinks,” he said. “But there can be outsized benefits when they come together.”
At MIT, interdisciplinary collaborations are encouraged and cultivated within a single lab, across departments, and through Institute-wide collaborations among scientists and engineers with external stakeholders like clinicians, investors, and entrepreneurs. For biomedical innovation especially, Birnbaum says, those bridges are essential.
Despite his success, Birnbaum noted that it is a challenging time for drug development, given the high costs of development, the speed needed to move from the lab to the clinic, and international competition. Still, he remains optimistic and encourages others to find the courage and patience needed to seek out problems worth solving.
“The best hope is that transformative advances will win. Whatever we can do to lead in making those advances is our most important job,” said Birnbaum.