A clinical-stage biotech reprogramming immune cells inside the body with RNA - no lab extraction, no waiting weeks for a batch.
Cell therapy has a paradox at its heart. The most powerful cancer treatments of the last decade - CAR-T therapies that re-engineer a patient's immune cells to hunt tumors - have also been among the hardest to deliver. Each dose is effectively bespoke: cells are drawn from a patient, shipped to a specialized facility, engineered over days or weeks, then infused back. The result can be extraordinary. The logistics can be crushing, and the price often runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
CREATE Medicines, a clinical-stage biotech at 300 Technology Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is built around a different premise. Instead of shipping cells to a factory, it delivers the factory instructions to the cells - inside the body. Its platform wraps CAR-encoding messenger RNA in a lipid nanoparticle, the same broad class of technology that carried mRNA vaccines, and uses it to program immune cells where they already live. The company calls this "in vivo immune programming."
The core idea is to turn a patient's own T cells, natural killer (NK) cells, and myeloid cells into chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) cells through an injection rather than a manufacturing run. A CAR is a synthetic receptor that gives an immune cell a new target - a marker on a tumor, or a marker on the immune cells driving an autoimmune disease. Traditionally that receptor is installed in a lab. CREATE installs it in the body.
That single design choice ripples outward. If the engineering happens in vivo, there is no cell collection, no multi-week manufacturing slot, and no personalized batch to track. The therapy can, in principle, be made ahead of time and kept on the shelf. It can also be given more than once - a meaningful departure in a field where many treatments are one-and-done. The company reports that it has shown, in humans, that immune cells can be programmed inside the body "tolerably and repeatedly."
The company was founded as Myeloid Therapeutics, with an early focus on programming myeloid cells - a class of immune cells long overshadowed by T cells in the cell-therapy race. As the platform matured, it learned to program more than one lineage. By October 2025, the name had become a ceiling. The company rebranded as CREATE Medicines to reflect a shift from myeloid-only work to what it calls multilineage, or "multi-immune," programming across T cells, NK cells, and myeloid cells.
The rebrand was not cosmetic. It signaled a widening of ambition - from oncology alone toward autoimmune disease and fibrosis, three areas where reprogramming the immune system could matter. Several oncology programs still carry their original "MT-" code names, a small fossil record of the company's earlier identity.
"Our clinical work in more than 40 patients has proven that we can tolerably and repeatedly program immune cells inside the body."
Daniel Getts, Chief Executive Officer & Co-FounderTwo problems sit at the center of CREATE's work. The first is access. Conventional CAR-T reaches a relatively small number of patients because of cost and manufacturing complexity. An off-the-shelf, injectable therapy is designed to widen that funnel. The second is durability and control. Because in vivo programming can be repeated, clinicians could in theory titrate and re-treat - adjusting therapy over time rather than betting everything on a single infusion.
For its autoimmune ambitions, the logic borrows from oncology. The lead autoimmune program, CRT-402, targets CD19 - the same B-cell marker used in many cancer CAR-T therapies - to deeply deplete the B cells that drive certain autoimmune conditions, effectively resetting part of the immune system. In non-human primates, the company reported deep B-cell depletion with repeat-dosing potential.
Ultimately, CREATE's customers are patients - people with solid tumors, autoimmune diseases, and fibrosis - reached through hospitals, clinicians, and clinical trial sites. Today, the programs are in clinical and preclinical development rather than on the market. The company says it has dosed more than 50 patients across its in vivo CAR programs, which it describes as among the largest clinical datasets in the in vivo CAR field.
| Program | Target / Indication | Cell Type | Stage |
|---|---|---|---|
| CRT-402 | CD19 · Autoimmune disease | T cells | Preclinical |
| CRT-403 | CD19 x BCMA (RetroT) | T cells | Preclinical |
| MT-302 | TROP2 · Frontline GEJ cancer | Myeloid cells | Clinical |
| MT-303 | GPC3 · Frontline liver cancer (HCC) | Myeloid cells | Clinical |
| MT-304 | HER2 · HER2+ solid tumors | NK & myeloid cells | Clinical |
| CRT-401 | HER2 x TROP2 | T, NK & myeloid cells | Clinical |
Pipeline as described on the company's website. "RetroT" refers to retrotransposon-mediated stability, a technique the company uses to extend receptor expression.
No cell collection or weeks-long ex vivo batch. An mRNA-LNP injection programs immune cells in place, which the company argues is far more scalable.
Where many CAR-T treatments are one-and-done, CREATE has shown tolerable repeat dosing in humans - opening the door to titration and re-treatment.
Not just T cells. The platform programs T cells, NK cells, and myeloid cells - useful for solid tumors where T-cell therapies have struggled.
Optional "jumping gene" biology helps engineered receptors persist longer, a lever conventional transient RNA approaches lack.
Business model. CREATE is a venture-backed, clinical-stage biotech. It funds research through equity financing from life-science investors and advances its pipeline toward regulatory approval, with future value expected from commercialized therapies and potential pharma partnerships or licensing. Because the platform is designed to lower manufacturing costs versus conventional cell therapy, its commercial thesis rests on scale - reaching many patients with an off-the-shelf product rather than a few with a bespoke one.
Where it fits in the market. CREATE sits in the fast-moving in vivo CAR field alongside players such as Capstan Therapeutics, Umoja Biopharma, EsoBiotec, and Interius BioTherapeutics, while positioning its lab-free approach against the established ex vivo CAR-T franchises from Novartis, Gilead's Kite, and Bristol Myers Squibb. Its differentiators are a clinical head start - the 50+ patients it has dosed - and its multilineage programming.
Expertise. The company's edge is in receptor and RNA engineering: designing CARs, stabilizing them with retrotransposon biology, and delivering them via mRNA-LNP to specific immune cell types. That combination of targeted delivery, multilineage programming, and repeat-dose tolerability is the core of its intellectual property.
Series B co-led by Newpath Partners, ARCH Venture Partners, and Hatteras Venture Partners, with Alexandria Venture Investments participating. Announced May 14, 2026.
Daniel Getts and colleagues launch a Cambridge biotech focused on in vivo myeloid cell programming with RNA.
The company changes its name as the platform expands from myeloid-only to multilineage T-, NK-, and myeloid-cell programming across oncology, autoimmunity, and fibrosis.
CREATE raises a $122M Series B, reports one of the field's largest clinical datasets, and pushes CRT-402 toward autoimmune trials while expanding its oncology pipeline. Ron Philip joins as Executive Chairman.
"Each clinical study informs and strengthens the next."
Daniel Getts, CEO & Co-Founder - on the company's iterative platform strategyIt develops in vivo CAR immunotherapies - treatments that use an mRNA-lipid nanoparticle platform to reprogram a patient's T cells, NK cells, and myeloid cells into disease-fighting CAR cells directly inside the body, without removing them for lab manufacturing.
Yes. It was founded as Myeloid Therapeutics and rebranded to CREATE Medicines in October 2025 after its platform expanded beyond myeloid cells to program multiple immune cell lineages.
The company raised a $122 million Series B in May 2026, co-led by Newpath Partners, ARCH Venture Partners, and Hatteras Venture Partners, bringing total funding to roughly $245 million.
Traditional CAR-T requires extracting a patient's cells, engineering them in a lab over weeks, and reinfusing them. CREATE's in vivo approach delivers the engineering instructions by injection, letting the body produce CAR cells itself - designed to be cheaper, repeat-dosable, and off-the-shelf.
Its pipeline spans oncology (solid tumors such as gastroesophageal, liver, and HER2-positive cancers), autoimmune disease (via its CD19-targeted CRT-402 program), and fibrosis.