Nionyx Bio's kidney gene therapy wins the 2026 BIO-Europe Spring Startup Spotlight

Hello, and welcome to Beyond Biotech, the weekly podcast from Le BioTech. I'm Dylan Kysain, and this is episode 191 for the podcast. This week, we welcome Magdalena Tepian, CEO, cofounder, and president of NioxBio, just days after the company took first place in the Bio Europe Spring startup spotlight competition in Lisbon. With a background that includes leading Forged Biologics through its $620,000,000 acquisition, Magdalena is now steering Nionics towards a bold new chapter in gene therapy for kidney disease. In this episode, we explore her journey into biotech, the science behind Nionics proprietary AAV capsid platform and kidney atlas, what it took to win the start up spotlight, and what the victory means for the young company's future. We also look ahead at the next milestones and the broader outlook for cell and gene therapies. Stay with us for an insightful forward looking conversation from an industry rising star. Magdalena, welcome to Beyond Biotech. Thank you for having me. Why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about your background? How did you first become interested in biotech? Yeah. I think it's a it's a great story. I think it's, it sort of resonates to a lot of people probably having and then listening to the podcast. Right? It's it's the curiosity aspect of what is possible. So I was lucky enough to be surrounded by really smart people growing up. And I think, you know, sort of after college, I was lucky to end up at a gene therapy company, in 2015, which, you basically if you're an early stage biotech company, it gives you the biotech MBA. So it's a company called ABI Auto Therapeutics. I did some venture capital before and some oncology m and a before, but this was sort of, the sort of the throw in that opened up my eyes, which was, you know, it was a rare disease company focused on CNS disorders. And, technically, I was told that with one shot, you could potentially cure a disease that had nothing for it. Right? And I think at that moment, I realized, number one, how many diseases out there had no hope, and then number two, that there's a possibility that onetime treatment could give additional years to life to numerous parents and their children. Right? So I think that was one of those eye opening moments. I remember having chills and looking at a mouse graph and saying, wait a second. Like, these mice are all dying, and these are living after one shot. Like, what is this magical, magical, you know, therapy? And with that, I just started becoming extremely curious, dove into every YouTube academic journal I could find, probably a lot of, you know, annoyed a lot of really brilliant PhDs. I've been doing it for a while. But, yeah, I became really interested in not only biotech as a whole, but as gene therapy and the possibility of what it could do. And, …