Imagine an era in which your best shot at beating cancer comes not from chemotherapy, but from a genetically engineered virus that doesn't just destroy cancer cells, but trains your immune system to finish the job. This is the promise of oncolytic virus immunotherapy, a radical frontier at the intersection of virology, immunology, and synthetic biology. The good news is that we are now in that era - thanks to Omios Biologics, a startup co-founded by Dr. Ian Mohr, professor of microbiology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and Dr. Aldo Pourchet, a former post-doctoral fellow at his lab. 

Omios introduces its modified pathogen to patients via intravenous delivery: selectively infecting solid tumors and leaving healthy cells untouched. “We engineer natural viruses to kill only cancer cells,” explains Pourchet. Such therapies have been developed before but Omios boasts a unique innovation. “The key fundamental is replication only within the tumor mass until there is no cancer cell left, a metric never hit because previous generations of oncolytic virus were too attenuated,” says Pourchet. “Our paradigm change is that we are not attenuated. We are targeted. We are able to engineer viruses that conserve the full virulence and replication capability of a natural virus in cancer cells while shutting them off completely in normal cells. The core technology of Omios is identifying the on-off switch that controls replication.”

This on/off switch is a mutation that exists specifically within cancer cells.  “We make our virus replication dependent on the presence of this mutation,” says Pourchet. These mutations provide biomarkers that help predict efficacy of treatment. The predictions, in turn, help identify the types of cancer most vulnerable to oncolytic virus therapies. “First, we are targeting triple negative breast cancers, all of which have the biomarker that makes them susceptible to our therapy,” Pourchet explains. “It’s our most advanced program - our main asset targets 100% of the triple negative breast cancer patients. We’re going for large populations with very high unmet needs.” 

Pourchet was wrangling oncolytic viruses as far back as the late 2000s, while completing his PhD in France. Their clinical potential was so readily apparent that he knew he wanted to keep working on them. He also knew NYU was the best place to do so. “Ian Mohr’s name was famous in connection with this technology. He patented at NYU the first oncolytic virus approved for use in the United States,” recalls Pourchet. “The best lab to develop new oncolytic viruses was Ian’s. And that’s where I ended up and I’m very happy about that.” Fifteen years of rigorous research followed. Pourchet and Mohr led the development of T-Stealth, a new immunotherapy system and early demonstration of the treatment potential of oncolytic viruses. After years of experimentation, they identified a vaccinia virus engineered at Arizona State University as the perfect fit for their nascent therapeutic platform. “Along with Ian’s NYU patent, this gave us traction, the foundation for the company and a groundbreaking new way to design these viruses.” By 2023, a team was assembled and Omios Biologics had been incorporated. 

The next year, Omios jumped feet-first into the NYU entrepreneurial ecosystem with the NYU Tech Venture Workshop. “That was a great experience and transformative for the company. They gave us early training in what we didn’t have enough of - business strategy,” recalls Pourchet. “Frank Rimalovski and team taught us how to build our story as an introduction to the company, about market research and pitching. But the most important thing we learned here was the importance of finding market fit by investigating the unmet needs of patients.”  They were able to leverage these learnings to earn a spot in a 2024 cohort of the NSF’s I-Corps program. “That was an exceptional program that I recommend to every founder,” says Pourchet. “Really intense, over seven weeks and a hundred interviews in which we started to really activate our network. And the coaching every week guides you through those interactions and helps you process them.” 

A crucial element of that process was customer discovery. “Researching therapeutics, you can come to believe you have something readymade for the customer base but that’s not the case,” says Pourchet. “The customers are not just patients but oncologists, biopharma, insurance companies. You learn how to conduct outreach, discover pain points and iterate. We were very  focused on the features of our platform but I-Corps taught us to emphasize its benefits, to patients, oncologists and to investors. It changed our thinking and that is how we identified all our great partners.” 

2025 also saw Omios participate in the NYU Tech Venture Accelerator, the third and final phase of the Tech Venture Program. Building where I-Corps left off, it helped the team apply what it had thus far learned and embark further down the commercialization path. Not only did TVA help research and make the connections, it got granular with training on how to do so effectively. “Frank even gave me template language for outreach emails that I use to this day,” chuckles Pourchet. “I did the TVA program with our CBO Bruno Larida and it helped us finalize our business tools and pitch to the point that we started getting funding. By the end of it, we got investments from NYU Langone Health Venture Fund, the NYU Innovation Venture Fund as well as a Korean venture capital fund, closing our pre-seed with enough to reach the next value inflection point. It was very motivating.”

Armed with all this new-found insight and funding, the Omios team is laser-focused on a promising future. “In the next six months, we will select our lead candidates,” Pourchet anticipates. “We’re aiming for IND approval in two years, first in-patient in three years. And in the meantime, we’re looking for a larger biopharma partnership that will support us in running clinical trials and help eventually push the therapy out to patients.” Meanwhile, as Pourchet says, the science itself marches on. “We are discovering more biomarkers and designing more oncolytic viruses. We have to focus on a few particular indications in the beginning but, in the end, we are looking for the platform to be cancer-agnostic.”