Welcome to #4 of the Deeptech From Scratch podcast!
In this episode, Kerstin Papenfuss speaks with Aleck Jones, Founder of Kindling Bio, a company developing a new approach to immunotherapy for childhood cancers.
Deeptech from scratch: Kindling Bio is building a platform to redirect pre-existing immunity against childhood cancers
Aleck joined Deep Science Ventures to build a company dedicated to solving childhood cancer. Early in the scoping process, he kept returning to a fundamental biological reality: “Kids aren’t mini adults.” Childhood cancer is a developmental disease rather than a mutational one, and therapies designed for mature immune systems do not behave the same way in children.
That biological mismatch is compounded by a commercial constraint. Individual childhood cancers are rare, making traditional drug development one disease at a time extremely difficult. Any solution needed to address both biological and commercial challenges.
From many diseases to a shared strategy
Aleck, a conceptual thinker who favours simple solutions, asked a provocative question: “If the problem is that there are lots of different cancers... why can't we just make them look the same?” Rather than designing a separate therapy for each cancer, the team looked for a shared system involved in all of them: the immune system. This led to a new framing: modifying tumours to make them look immunologically similar from the perspective of a child’s immune system.
This brings us to the question of what is Kindling Bio? It is a gene therapy platform that modifies tumour cells from within by using specific microbial structures, the same ones our immune systems are trained to recognise through early-life vaccinations, Kindling Bio redirects a pre-existing immune response to target the tumour. This approach accesses the full power of both the adaptive and innate immune response. Crucially, it piggybacks on existing immune responses, removing the need for the horribly expensive engineered T-cells.
Zero to one: The origin story
The journey from academia to incorporation involved sorting through 18 different conceptual solutions. Aleck describes his transition as being like a "little gazelle when it's born, standing on its wobbly legs and then suddenly... galloping across the field".
Within 10 minutes of meeting his Co-Founder, Jeff, the decision to partner was made. They found an immediate connection in their problem-solving approach and a shared anchor: the mission is worth it even to save just one child's life.
What’s next?
Kindling Bio was incorporated in the summer of 2025 and is now operating from the London Cancer Hub. Since then, the team has established a collaboration with the University of Sussex for early proof-of-concept data and secured prototype viruses which are currently being characterised. They have also filed two patents, won an Innovate UK grant, and took the top prize at the Hack for Hope Innovation Forum in Paris.
The next milestone is testing these systems in a living model to demonstrate the expected biological response and move toward clinical development.
Kindling is opening an investment round later this year and continues to build relationships across the paediatric oncology community, including researchers, clinicians, and patient advocates.
You can listen to the full episode here and learn more about Kindling Bio on their