Person / Biotech / Cell Therapy
Andrew
Andrew
Schiermeier
He builds CAR-T cells with an off switch - living medicine you can dial down after it is already inside you.
He builds CAR-T cells with an off switch - living medicine you can dial down after it is already inside you.
A CAR-T cell, once infused, is a one-way decision. It hunts, it multiplies, and if it turns on the wrong target or floods the body too hard, there is no recall button. Andrew Schiermeier runs the company trying to install that button. As President and CEO of AvenCell Therapeutics, he is shepherding a platform that makes engineered T-cells you can switch off and back on - even after a patient has received them.
The idea sounds almost mundane until you sit with what it means. The most feared part of cell therapy is its momentum. AvenCell's pitch is control. A "universal" CAR-T cell is manufactured blind to its target, then aimed by a separate molecule that acts like a key. Remove the key, the cells go quiet. Add it back, they re-engage. Schiermeier's job is to turn that elegant trick into approved medicine.
He came to it the long way - through mechanical engineering, biomechanics, applied mathematics, and a stint running oncology for a German pharma giant. He is, by training and temperament, a person who looks at a biological problem and reaches for an engineering answer. In 2024 he convinced Novo Holdings and a roster of healthcare investors that the answer was worth $112 million.
“This modular approach allows for unparalleled future flexibility and reduction in cycle times, massive scaling of supply, and meaningful reductions in cost of goods.- Andrew Schiermeier, on separating cell manufacturing from the target
CAR-T transformed certain blood cancers. It also developed a reputation for the cancers it could not touch. Acute myeloid leukemia is one of them. The natural target on AML cells, CD123, sits on healthy tissue too, so hitting it hard enough to matter tends to hurt the patient. Conventional CAR-T, with no off switch, had no good answer.
Schiermeier pointed AvenCell straight at it. A switchable cell is built for exactly this kind of fight: turn the targeting molecule down when toxicity climbs, turn it back up when the patient stabilizes. AvenCell's lead candidate, AVC-201, is an allogeneic, CD123-directed switchable CAR-T, and the company has dosed its first patients in relapsed and refractory AML.
There is a second, quieter bet underneath the first. AvenCell, under Schiermeier, was the first to fully separate the manufacture of the cells from the patients and cancers they would eventually target. Make the cells once, point them anywhere. That decoupling is what lets him talk about scale, speed, and cost in a field famous for being slow, bespoke, and expensive.
The ambition does not stop at blood. The same control that makes a therapy safer in AML is what cell therapy needs to crack solid tumors and autoimmune disease - the frontiers where the field's promise has mostly outrun its results. That is the territory Schiermeier keeps describing when he talks about transforming the standard of care.
He collected the parts of an engineer's mind across a decade of study, then aimed the whole assembly at oncology.
“AvenCell is working to transform the standard of care through switchable, adaptable and readily available cell therapy treatments that can better treat a wide range of difficult-to-treat cancer and autoimmune diseases.- Andrew Schiermeier, on AvenCell's $112M Series B
His big structural move was treating cell therapy like a manufacturing problem - decouple the product from the target so you can scale, speed up, and cut cost.
He pointed AvenCell at a cancer where CAR-T had never worked, because the off switch is exactly what that fight had been missing.
He rose to COO at the company that became the first to show clinical efficacy with a systemically administered CRISPR therapeutic.
Before the CAR-T money, he chaired a Gates Foundation-supported nonprofit making medicines for the developing world.
The story Schiermeier is selling investors and patients is not about a single molecule. It is about control - the difference between a therapy that happens to you and one you can steer. In a field that has spent a decade promising to reprogram the immune system, he is betting the next decade belongs to whoever can put a hand back on the wheel.
Whether AvenCell's switch holds up across the clinic is still being written, one dosed patient at a time. But the thesis is clear, and so is the man behind it: an engineer who refuses to believe that powerful medicine has to be uncontrollable medicine.