Approach

Medicine has spent decades organising biology into diseases. Thousands of labels. Thousands of targets. Thousands of fragmented solutions for one biology.

But disease is a label, not a primary cause. Biology isn’t organised by disease. Health depends on conserved adaptive systems that sense stress, enable repair and restore function.

Medicine thinks in diseases. Biology thinks in adaptation.

At Istesso we have identified a way to activate those conserved adaptive programmes pharmacologically. Our mitochondrial Complex I modulators (MCMs) are oral small molecules with a novel mechanism relative to classical Complex I agents. They elicit adaptive integrated stress responses that mobilise endogenous progenitor cells, control aberrant inflammation, and drive anatomically appropriate repair and regeneration across multiple tissues.

One conserved biology. Multiple tissues. Regenerative by design, not by suppressing, replacing or engineering biology, but by turning the body’s own adaptive systems back on.

Our platform combines deep mechanistic insight, proprietary models and a growing Adaptive Repair Atlas: every treated patient contributes data that compounds the value of the entire platform, independent of any single asset.

The same biology that underpins muscle repair operates in other tissues. Muscle is our first, highest-conviction validation point. It’s highly regenerative, measurable, and captures significant unmet clinical need.

We believe the next era of medicine will build health. Instead of asking “How do we manage another disease?” it will ask “How do we restore the biology that enables tissues to repair?””