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Orikine Bio's team. Image / Orikine
 14.01.2026

Orikine Bio settles in the Science Park to advance the design of innovative immunotherapies

The biotechnology company Orikine Bio has arrived at the Barcelona Science Park (PCB-UB) to drive new immunological therapies. Its technology focuses on the design and development of therapies based on enhanced bi-specific and bi-functional cytokines. These molecules, regulating the immune system’s response, can correct immune dysfunctions that cause numerous autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

Founded in 2022 as a spin-off from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, Orikine Bio was created by Drs. Luis Serrano, Ariadna Montero, Javier Delgado, and Alejo Chorny, with support from investors AdBio Partners and subsequently Asabys Partners. Thanks to its combination of cutting-edge research, protein engineering, synthetic biology and immunology the company has positioned itself as an upcoming key player in the discovery, research and development of precision immune therapies and contributes to the growth of the Catalan and European biotechnology sector.

At the core of Orikine Bio’s activity is the immune system, a highly complex defence machinery of the human body. When functioning correctly, it protects us from any type of infection, parasites or cancer; but when dysregulated, it can attack the body itself, causing autoimmune and inflammatory diseases such as ulcerative colitis disease and psoriasis. Understanding how immune cells wrongly communicate is essential for the development of novel drugs that reestablish immune balance in patients suffering from these diseases. This is where cytokines come into play – molecules that act as messengers and regulators of the immune system.

Cytokines: messengers of the immune system

Cytokines are proteins that function as messengers indicating when to activate a defensive immune response, when to stop it, or how to coordinate different types of cells in the face of infection or injury.

When this communication system is dysregulated, the immune system may overreact or respond inappropriately, leading to chronic autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. For this reason, cytokines have long been a key target in drug development. However, many current cytokine-based therapies cause severe side effects or toxicity due to a lack of sufficient tissue or cell specificity.

This need for more precise and cell-specific treatments is the starting point for Orikine Bio’s work. Precision-engineered, fine-tuned bispecific and bi-functional cytokines with optimized drug-like properties have the potential to modulate and reshape inflammatory profiles in key immune cells.

Foldikines™: technology that reprograms the immune response with enhanced therapeutic index

Immunological disorders represent a significant unmet medical need. Therefore, Orikine Bio has developed its proprietary Foldikine™ technology, a synthetic biology platform that enables the design of enhanced bi-specific and bi-functional cytokines tailored to targeting and reprogramming of specific immune cell types.

The Foldikine™ platform combines computational biology, protein engineering, and immunology to create molecules that act like a biological software code, capable of correcting errors in immune system communication. This allows the immune response to be tuned with greater precision, increasing treatment efficacy while reducing adverse effects and potentially leading to truly disease modifying, curative outcomes. “Drug candidates generated with the Foldikine™ platform are highly specific for their target cells, establishing optimized potency and efficacy at minimized unwanted pleiotropic or unspecific activation of non-target cells”, says Christian Pangratz, CEO of Orikine Bio.

This approach enables Orikine Bio to develop a new generation of precision immunotherapies for patients with autoimmune and inflammatory diseases who currently have limited or no treatment options.

Since its creation, Orikine has secured significant funding to advance its research. In 2023, the startup closed a €5.5 million seed round, led by AdBio Partners and Asabys Partners and obtained €2.8 million in non-dilutive government grant funding aimed at accelerating preclinical development of its drug candidates and expanding the scientific team.