How etherna Turns RNA and Lipid Nanoparticle Expertise into a Head Start for Drug Developers

etherna's roots are in oncology, tracing back to the development of ex vivo dendritic cell therapy against melanoma, an in vivo naked RNA program for melanoma, and a program targeting HPV-positive cancers. But in developing such therapies, it became clear that there was a lack of effective RNA and lipid nanoparticle (LNP) technologies that were also licensable. So, etherna repositioned and built those technologies themselves.

Now, rather than developing its own therapeutics, etherna makes its technologies and manufacturing capabilities available to partners through licensing and collaboration, with the company’s long-standing in-house RNA and LNP expertise as the foundation for its offerings. To learn more about what etherna can offer drug developers within the Oncode Accelerator oncology ecosystem, as a new partner within the program, we spoke to their CEO, Bernard Sagaert. 

Starting Strong, With the Right Technology

Bernard initially joined etherna nine years ago to focus on quality and manufacturing. Over his time with the company, Bernard held roles leading quality assurance, quality control, and production, and was COO before taking on the role of CEO. Having seen all the challenges that drug developers face across these different points in the development pipeline, Bernard emphasizes one key value offering that etherna can deliver through Oncode Accelerator’s Therapeutic Vaccines Workstream. 

“It’s about timing,” Bernard says. “To make a difference for patients, our platforms need to be part of drug development very early. Switching to a different delivery platform at a later stage is difficult and means that scientists will have to redo a lot of work. It's better to start with something that's manufacturable at scale, already available, and licensable.”

Bernard gives a clear example of what etherna wants to help drug developers avoid: “A couple of weeks ago, a company contacted us. They had great results, their payload was fine, but they did all their tests with a proprietary LNP technology. So, they were confronted with the situation of wanting to go into the clinic but not having a product because the delivery engine was not licensable.” 

To overcome this challenge, etherna can support drug developers in a hands-on way, all the way from discovery to clinical manufacturing. Collaborations with etherna typically begin with an evaluation, then move into a research collaboration license agreement, with a guaranteed path to a full license once the partner has a viable product. In terms of technology, etherna primarily offers three distinct but tightly connected capabilities: RNA design and optimization, selection of a delivery engine, and manufacturing.

1. RNA Design and Optimization

“Making RNA looks very easy, and if you do it at a small scale, you can do it in every lab,” says Bernard. “But you need expertise to optimize constructs.”

etherna has the knowledge and the technology to make sure that RNA constructs are optimized for stability, prolonged and durable expression and, critically, manufacturability at scale. “Sometimes it's forgotten that it needs to be manufacturable, and manufacturable at scale,” says Bernard. “If you don’t optimize constructs from the start, you can fail your preclinical studies because of bad product quality, not because of a bad idea. That should not happen. If the idea fails, fine - that's science. But it should not fail on product quality.”

2. Delivery Engine Selection

etherna has a library of roughly 2500 different proprietary ionizable lipids, and eight distinct LNP formulations based on those. Each of the formulations is tuned to deliver a therapy to the right cells at the intended site of action, support efficient expression, and maintain a strong safety profile. 

For example, etherna’s intratumoral platform enables direct tumor injection with observed abscopal effects, where treating one tumor triggers the reduction of others elsewhere in the body. This platform is already helping to advance cancer therapies towards the clinic. One example of this is LAD116, a novel therapy targeting non-melanoma skin cancer based on etherna's intratumoral mRNA/LNP platform and developed in collaboration with Spanish pharmaceutical company Almirall. “LAD116 is based on several of our technologies, including the start of a payload that we had in-house,” explains Bernard. “In our partnership model, we optimized the payload, we optimized the LNP, and the RNA and LNP together. Now, that’s the product that Almirall is bringing to the clinic.” In February 2026, the potential new therapy advanced for further development in IND-enabling studies and eventual phase I clinical trials.

“We are also keeping up with the hype of the moment: the switch from ex vivo therapies to in vivo therapies in oncology,” adds Bernard. “etherna is developing formulations for in vivo CAR-T and CAR-M approaches, to engineer CAR expressing immune cells directly inside the patient rather than manufacturing them outside the body. That has tremendous cost savings. A typical ex vivo CAR-T therapy costs somewhere between €500 000 and €1 million. If you use an in vivo approach, you're looking at around €100 000. And that cost saving can make these therapies available to a much larger patient population.”

3. Quality Manufacturing at Scale

The third pillar is manufacturing: Bernard’s focus for much of his career. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, most players in our field scaled up their benchtop RNA manufacturing quickly,” he reflects. “But they often did that without considering optimization, and without fully addressing batch-to-batch variability. At etherna, we used that period to improve our systems for quality and yield instead of scaling up. As a result, now we know that we can scale up without negatively impacting quality levels.”

This focus on quality even at scale is still not a given in the field – but is key for success in oncology. Bernard explains: “Batch-to-batch variability has a clinical effect. You don't want that in oncology, and you definitely don't want it in novel areas like gene editing or CAR therapies. And that’s where we have made big advancements at etherna.”

Collaboration for Acceleration

Asked about the biggest hurdle facing the field of immuno-oncology today, Bernard doesn't hesitate: “There's no approved product yet.” Nonetheless, the underlying biology in the field is sound, he says, citing that etherna's own ex vivo dendritic cell results in late-stage melanoma from 2013–2016 have since been repeated in in vivo approaches from pharma companies like Moderna, and that patients treated in etherna’s early trials remain alive and relapse-free years later. One thing that is still missing, in Bernard’s view, is better patient stratification – a key focus of the well-defined Patient Cohorts Platform of Oncode Accelerator. If therapy developers can better identify which patients a given treatment will be effective for, that will drive the field forward.

Looking to the future, Bernard draws a comparison to VIB, the Belgian life sciences institute that etherna has a longstanding collaboration with. “We have built a very nice interface with VIB, where they use our technologies in their developments, and we can make use of their materials and capabilities. I think we can build something similar with Oncode Accelerator,” he says. The immediate ambition for etherna within Oncode Accelerator is to provide acceleration. Because etherna's platforms already exist and are ready to license, they can help partners across the oncology ecosystem move from concept to clinic faster than they could by building delivery and manufacturing capabilities from scratch. 

Looking further ahead, Bernard also has a clear moonshot for etherna’s partnership with Oncode Accelerator: “If in ten years we can have patient impact through a product that has been launched based on our technologies, that would be a great success.” 

Post-Interview Update

On 24 August 2026, Valerio Therapeutics announced its acquisition of etherna. etherna's mRNA and LNP platform, combined with Valerio’s targeted delivery technology, opens a path to therapies neither company could reach alone. 

Read the press release