Our Purpose-Built Therapeutic Platform: A Unique Combination of Technologies

The Klarity™ Platform

At Kallyope, we are pioneering the science and understanding of gut and gut-brain biology to create medicines that transform human health.

It all begins with the gut-brain axis. The gut is our largest sensory organ with a surface area 100 times that of the skin. It’s home to more nerve cells than the spinal cord, most of our immune system, and 95% of the body’s serotonin. For centuries, science has recognized the relationship between the gut and the brain — but only recently has the scientific community begun to understand the central role that connection plays in governing physiology and behavior.

KLARITY™, our purpose-built therapeutic platform, brings together the broadest set of integrated end-to-end technologies for discovery and translation of gut-brain biology in the biopharma landscape today.

Our platform’s strength is its novel combination of multiple discovery and translation-enabling technologies and our unique expertise in applying them. The result is an integrated end-to-end process for powerful and repeatable innovation that speeds exploration and greatly increases overall probability of success.

Integrated Technologies for
Discovery and Translation of Gut-Brain Biology

Single-cell sequencing

Single-cell sequencing of all cell types that comprise the mouse and the human gut-brain axis is the foundation of our approach. We have generated more than 100 cell atlases and identified more than 100 key sensory cells in the gut-brain axis, including characterization of the cells’ receptors and hormones.

Circuit mapping

Building on this cellular understanding, we use circuit mapping to understand how these cells are communicating with each other. We leverage tools that have been developed for the study of circuits in the brain to understand the circuitry between the gut and the brain.

Optogenetics and chemogenetics

To understand the functions of the specialized cells we’ve identified by sequencing, we use optogenetics and chemogenetics. These tools allow highly selective activation of a specific neuron or set of neurons so that we can observe the physiology of that cell.

Mouse and human organoids

Gut organoids allow us to study the functions of the various cell types in a highly relevant in vitro system which recapitulates the activity of different cell types acting together in a tissue.

Gut-targeted molecules

Our modality of gut-targeted chemistry relies on a variety of strategies to target intracellular or cell-surface targets in the gut. It is designed to produce small molecules that have very minimal systemic exposure, which we expect to translate into improved safety for our investigational therapeutics.

Human Genetics

Our proprietary Human Genetics Platform (HGP) for the analysis of Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) represents a new approach to revealing the genes underlying human disease, driving target discovery, and increasing the probability of translational success. The HGP is a major advance in the analysis of GWAS data, computing the probability that every gene in the genome is directly affected by a causal variant underlying disease. The HGP leverages recent advances in functional genomics, statistical genetics, and deep learning to solve longstanding challenges in the interpretation of GWAS data, enabling us to mine common genetic variation in the human population for novel therapeutics.

A unifying statistical framework to discover disease genes from GWASs, McManus et al., Cell Genomics