Vivek Ra­maswamy’s broth­er, Shankar, spins out on his own, launch­ing au­da­cious gene ther­a­py play

In 2018, when Vivek Ra­maswamy’s Ax­o­vant failed mul­ti­ple tri­als on its lead de­men­tia drug and piv­ot­ed the en­tire com­pa­ny to­ward gene ther­a­py, one em­ploy­ee took a par­tic­u­lar lik­ing to the new sci­ence: Vivek’s broth­er, Shankar Ra­maswamy.

Now Shankar, who was hired as one of Roivant’s first 10 em­ploy­ees while still in med­ical school, is strik­ing out on his own. Along­side a for­mer Spark Ther­a­peu­tics co-founder and a sup­port­ing cast drawn from some of the biggest name gene ther­a­py biotechs, he’s raised $80 mil­lion around a vi­sion of build­ing a mas­sive gene ther­a­py com­pa­ny that can tack­le dis­eases more preva­lent than the rare ge­net­ic dis­eases com­pa­nies have fo­cused on to date. It’s called Kriya Ther­a­peu­tics.

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