Startups
Biotechnology / Funding / Startups

Meenal Lele’s Hanimune Therapeutics develops allergy prevention products. Next up: treatment

The Philly biotech company just closed a seed round as it develops a consumable egg allergy treatment.

Hanimune Therapeutics' Lil Mixins. (Screenshot)
Meenal Lele was an allergy mom before she became an allergy entrepreneur.

Her son developed food allergies at a young age, and she learned soon after his diagnosis that a high percentage of peanut allergies are preventable.

“This was really devastating news because if we had known this information just six months earlier, we would have done something different,” she said.

In 2019, Lele started Hanimune Therapeutics, a Kensington-based biotech company that has developed allergy preventative products and is currently researching and developing allergy treatment products. To get to the next stage, the company just closed a round of seed funding.

No one is born with a food allergy, she told Technical.ly; instead, allergies typically develop when a child is between six and 10 months old. She said intervention to prevent a food allergy should start at six months and continue until the child is at least a year old.

Within Hanimune Therapeutics is the brand Lil Mixins, which is focused on allergy preventative products. Because babies need exposure to proteins at a specific age to develop a tolerance to an allergen, Lele said, the products are concentrated proteins that parents can give their children — and know exactly what to give at what time — to help prevent a food allergy.

The company is now working on treatments, too, and Lele aims to have an egg allergy treatment to submit to the FDA this year. She said the goal is for the treatment to be a consumable product, potentially a pill or a powder.

“What we’re working on is changing the structure of the protein. So it’s still the same egg proteins, but we’ve changed their structure, and what that change in structure does is change how the body interacts with that protein,” she said. “By changing how the body interacts with it, you can drive somebody’s body to develop tolerance to that protein without side effects during the treatment process.”

It’s a long process of working with allergists to see how people react to products, what’s working and what isn’t. That means working with food scientists, immunologists, allergists and combining all of their expertise into the drug development, per the founder.

Hanimune is made up of a few full-time employees, many of whom are in the Philadelphia area, plus some part-timers focused on R&D. In total, the team has less than 10 people.

This isn’t Lele’s first rodeo with a biotech startup: The University of Pennsylvania grad previously worked on an orthopedic medicine startup and a vascular medicine company, both of which were eventually sold.

Hanimune just finished the seed round in January which was led by BioAdvance, a biotech fund in Radnor. Other contributors included Ben Franklin Technology Partners and angel investors. Lele declined to share the exact amount raised, though an SEC filing puts the total at $3.3 million. The funding raised in this round will be used to start the FDA process with a treatment as well as grow the prevention side of the business and make those products more accessible to consumers.

“I think that you will start to see the prevention side really mature in the sense that, whenever you come up with a new thing in medicine, it often takes 10 years for doctors to really start to adopt it,” she said. “I think you’re going to start seeing that [adoption] this year.”

Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
Companies: Ben Franklin Technology Partners / BioAdvance
Engagement

Join the conversation!

Find news, events, jobs and people who share your interests on Technical.ly's open community Slack

Trending

What company leaders need to know about the CTA and required reporting

How venture capital is changing, and why it matters

The ‘Amazon of science stores’ and 30 other vendors strut their stuff for Philly biotech

Why the DOJ chose New Jersey for the Apple antitrust lawsuit

Technically Media