Approach

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

But disease isn’t a primary cause. It’s a label. Biology isn’t organised by disease. It’s adaptive. Nature built integrated response systems that sense stress, restore function and enable repair.

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—highly regenerative, measurable, and clinically urgent. Success there de-risks expansion across the platform.

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