A hot year for cell therapy start-ups

Abstract

Engineered cell therapies that seek and destroy cancer are no longer science fiction, and investors can’t seem to get enough of them. By mid-November this year, cell therapy start-ups had announced raising nearly $2 billion from venture capital firms. The windfall is easily traced back to the approval of cell therapies from Novartis and Gilead Sciences 2 years ago. “Until 2017, there were a lot of skeptics,” says Usman “Oz” Azam, the former head of cell and gene therapy at Novartis. “What changed everything was the fact that a product got approved.” The two products are CAR T-cell therapies, in which a person’s own T cells are isolated, genetically engineered, and reinfused to kill cancer. With two success stories in hand, biotech start-ups are eager to improve on and expand what CAR T-cell (CAR-T) therapy, and other kinds of cell therapies, can do. Azam is leading one such effort as