The biotech that treats the genome like a mixing board - riding gene activity up and down without ever cutting the DNA.
Walk into the conversation around Tune Therapeutics in 2026 and you will not hear the usual gene-editing bravado about cutting, deleting, rewriting. You will hear something stranger and quieter. Tune does not want to change what your DNA says. It wants to change how loudly it is read. The company calls this epigenetic editing, and for the first time it is happening inside actual patients - people with chronic hepatitis B, sitting in clinics in New Zealand and Hong Kong, receiving a drug designed to turn a disease gene down and persuade it to stay down.
That is the whole heresy in one sentence. Most of biotech's celebrated tools - CRISPR and its cousins - are scissors. They make a permanent cut. Tune built a fader instead: a way to dial a gene's expression up, down, or off using the cell's own regulatory machinery, the epigenome, while leaving the underlying genetic code untouched. It is reversible. It is programmable. And it is, in the most literal sense, a tune.
Mastering the Epigenome - Transforming Human Healthspan.
The genome is hardware. The epigenome is the software that decides which parts run, and how hard. Tune's TEMPO platform writes to that software.
The engine. A proprietary genetic-tuning system that selectively activates, silences, or fine-tunes specific genes by editing epigenetic marks rather than the DNA sequence - reversible and multiplexable by design.
A first-in-class epigenetic silencer for chronic hepatitis B, a virus that affects an estimated 250M+ people. Designed to durably shut down viral gene expression. Now in first-in-human trials in New Zealand and Hong Kong.
Beyond HBV, Tune applies TEMPO to gene activation, cell reprogramming and age-related disease - the long bet that dialing gene activity is medicine's next platform, not just a one-disease trick.
Tune spun out of Duke University's Gersbach Lab in 2021. Its bench is unusually decorated for a company this young.
The platform traces back to his lab at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, where he directs the Center for Advanced Genomic Technologies.
A pioneer of genome engineering credited with helping coin the very term "genome editing," long before Tune existed.
Helps steer the financial machinery behind a capital-hungry, clinical-stage genetic-medicine company across two cities.
Former CSO and Head of R&D at Gilead Sciences and ex-CEO of Assembly Biosciences, with deep experience in hepatitis drug development.
Going beyond the code.
The January 2025 Series B was one of the largest single rounds the epigenetic-editing field has seen - and the investors say something about the ambition.
| Round | Amount | Date | Notable backers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series A | ~$60M | 2021 | NEA, Emerson Collective, Hatteras |
| Series B | $175M+ | Jan 2025 | NEA, Yosemite, Regeneron Ventures, Hevolution Foundation |
Note the names. Regeneron Ventures brings pharma credibility. Hevolution Foundation - a fund built specifically to extend healthy human lifespan - signals that Tune's pitch was never just about one virus. It was about the genome's volume knob as a general-purpose tool. (Figures from public reporting; amounts approximate.)
The near-term promise is for people living with chronic hepatitis B - a condition that today has no reliable cure, only suppression.
Researchers and pharma teams get a tunable, reversible alternative to permanent gene editing - potentially safer for chronic dosing.
If gene expression can be dialed, the same logic could touch aging, regeneration and a wide class of "gene-dysregulation" diseases.
Return to those patients in New Zealand and Hong Kong. A year ago, a chronic-hepatitis-B diagnosis meant a lifetime of management - drugs that suppress, but a virus that waits. The people now enrolled in Tune's trials are not testing another suppressant. They are testing the idea that you can walk up to a misbehaving gene, turn it down, and walk away while it stays quiet.
Whether TUNE-401 ultimately works is a question only the data will answer, and biotech is humble for good reason. But the bet underneath it is already changing the conversation: that medicine's next leap is not louder editing but better listening - finding the right gene, at the right volume, and leaving the rest of the code alone. The mixing board is plugged in. Tune is reaching for the fader.