Elicio Therapeutics

Elicio Therapeutics

Elicio Therapeutics was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Boston. Chief Executive Officer Robert Connelly, previously a senior executive at Pulmatrix and Domantis, operates the company alongside Dr. Christopher Haqq, the Head of Research and Development and Chief Medical Officer. The firm's foundational technology is an in-license from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Darrell Irvine's lab pioneered the amphiphile platform. The company's strategy deploys a single technology platform across multiple solid tumor indications and infectious disease targets. Its pipeline is anchored in oncology, where lead vaccine candidate ELI-002 targets mutated KRAS, a common driver of pancreatic and colorectal cancers. A Phase 1 study read out in 2024, and the firm concurrently moved into a Phase 2 trial in pancreatic cancer. The pipeline also includes a node-targeted therapeutic vaccine for HPV-related cancers, ELI-008, in preclinical development. Geographically, clinical operations are concentrated at sites across the United States, supported by manufacturing partnerships in the US. Elicio went public on the Nasdaq in June 2023 via a reverse merger with Angion Biomedica, transitioning its capital base from a private, venture-backed structure to a publicly traded one. That transaction coincided with the appointment of Robert Connelly as CEO. The firm has historically been supported by venture investors including Morningside Group and the Gillson Charitable Trust, though as a public company its funding now derives from equity markets and grant partnerships. In January 2024, the company presented updated Phase 1 data for ELI-002 and outlined its path to a randomized Phase 2 study. Elicio's structural architecture differs from most clinical-stage biotechs because its entire pipeline is gated on a single delivery hypothesis rather than a target-specific biology platform. The conviction is that getting immune-stimulating molecules to the lymph node creates better, more durable T-cell responses regardless of the cancer antigen. This makes the firm a bet on immunotherapy delivery physics rather than on any one tumor type, a high-engineering-risk, high-reward profile that attracted Morningside and MIT before the reverse merger financed Phase 2.