Kenai: Off-the-shelf Parkinson’s progenitors with precision transplant tech

With Japan ushering the world’s first iPSC-derived regenerative medicine for Parkinson’s disease onto the market, and a second candidate moving through a global Phase III, Kenai is aiming to push the field beyond motor symptom control toward cognitive restoration.

Levodopa, the standard of care for Parkinson’s disease, controls symptoms but does not slow the loss of dopamine neurons that drives progression. Cell therapies designed to replace those neurons have long held the promise of reversing the disease, but early fetal tissue-based approaches proved unviable, partly because they produced heterogeneous cell populations and could not be scaled...