Although significant advances in mRNA vaccines have been made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, RNA-based medicines still face challenges with manufacturing, safety, and access. One Georgia Tech startup seeks to address these obstacles. Launched in 2022 with $2 million in seed funding from Open Philanthropy, Piezo Therapeutics offers a simple, affordable, and scalable platform that combines electric pulses and microneedles to deliver nucleic acid medicines safely and efficiently. 

Leveraging Georgia Tech technology, the company aims to address global health needs by improving access to RNA and DNA medicines, which can be extended broadly to vaccines, therapeutic proteins, gene therapies, and more. The Piezo Therapeutics team hopes their platform—with its far-reaching advantages in cost, scalability, and safety—will become the new standard mode of delivery for a wide range of nucleic acid medicines across the world.  

The technology: Low-cost, ultra-portable, and rapidly scalable delivery platform for mRNA and DNA vaccines 

Nucleic acid vaccines are transforming the fight against infectious diseases, but current delivery approaches suffer from limitations. DNA vaccines, such as those used for COVID-19, use viral vectors to deliver DNA, while mRNA vaccines require a shell around the mRNA called a lipid nanoparticle (LNP) to push the mRNA into the cell and protect the mRNA from degradation. These common delivery mechanisms—viruses for DNA vaccines and LNPs for mRNA vaccines—both face challenges due to high costs, complex manufacturing, poor stability, and reactogenicity concerns. Electroporation, which uses brief electric pulses, is an alternative approach that could provide effective delivery but requires the use of devices called electroporators that have historically been complicated, painful for patients, and expensive—on the order of thousands of dollars per device plus additional maintenance costs. 

To address these issues, Georgia Tech researchers created a rapidly scalable delivery platform for mRNA and DNA vaccines, replacing both LNPs and conventional electroporators. The ultra-low-cost (<1 USD), portable (<50 g), battery-free electroporation system combines piezoelectricity with microneedles to enable intracellular delivery of nucleic acids. In a 2021 PNAS paper, a research group led by Dr. Mark Prausnitz and Dr. Saad Bhamla showed this system is able to significantly improve gene delivery and induce robust immune responses to a nucleic acid vaccine in animals. 

The licensee: Creating the new standard mode of delivery for nucleic acid medicines 

After conducting extensive customer discovery research through the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, Piezo Therapeutics spun out of Georgia Tech in late 2022. Founded by a diverse group of experts in the field of drug delivery and commercial translation, the company aims to replace the LNPs used to deliver mRNA vaccines as well as existing electroporation technology by reducing complexity, lowering costs, improving tolerability, and enabling rapid scalability with their novel platform. By further developing the technology and partnering with pharmaceutical companies with new vaccines and other therapeutics, the team aims to expand its impact with a broader mission towards global health. 

“The vision is to become the new standard mode of delivery for a diverse range of nucleic acid medicines,” said Georgia Tech alumnus Gaurav Byagathvalli, co-founder and CEO of the startup. “Our technology has advantages in cost, scalability, and safety. And because it’s a device-based approach, we can deliver a wide range of nucleic acid therapeutics without any significant customization.” 

The impact of technology transfer: Optimizing the delivery platform and pursuing partnerships 

As a result of the technology transfer, Piezo Therapeutics has established roots in Atlanta and is hiring locally to grow its team, becoming part of the city’s flourishing biotechnology ecosystem. In the first several months after its launch, the company’s in-house R&D developed new versions of the device, adding new functionalities that are unrivaled by their competitors. 

Beyond developing the technology, the Piezo Therapeutics team is cultivating relationships with investors and pharmaceutical companies to engage in research collaborations and partnerships. 

“Georgia Tech’s Quadrant-i, and in particular Dr. Cynthia Sundell, was instrumental in helping us craft our message and formulate the pitch we needed to communicate with investors and potential pharmaceutical partners,” said Byagathvalli.

The seamless technology transfer between Georgia Tech and Piezo Therapeutics serves as a model for the Georgia Tech Office of Technology Licensing’s goal to rapidly move technologies out of the lab and into the marketplace. 

“They are a great team to work with,” said Ben DeGreen from Georgia Tech’s Office of Technology Licensing. “We’ve just executed a license agreement with them and are looking forward to what comes next. From a technology standpoint and given those who are involved in this startup, the likelihood of success is high.” 

The future

Thanks to the successful technology transfer and the work of the Piezo Therapeutics team since launch, the company expects to see great progress in 2025. In 2024, the team published a human study on the device, with encouraging results. The company aims to secure partnerships with a range of pharmaceutical companies across diverse therapeutic modalities, including vaccines, immunotherapies, therapeutic proteins, and dermal gene therapies.

The ultimate dream is to bridge the gap to the billions of people who didn’t get to receive the mRNA vaccines and cutting-edge treatments that came out of the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Byagathvalli acknowledges it will take time, capital, and resources, but the team is well equipped to get there. 

“My hope is that by 2030, I’m getting a flu shot with our device,” Byagathvalli said. “To see a device that we developed at Georgia Tech and Piezo Therapeutics go to market and help save lives on a global scale would be incredibly rewarding.”