Immunology · Biotech · Cambridge, MA
Daniel Getts
The immunologist betting that the best place to build a cell therapy is not a lab. It is the patient.
CEO & Co-Founder, CREATE Medicines (formerly Myeloid Therapeutics)
The immunologist betting that the best place to build a cell therapy is not a lab. It is the patient.
Most cell therapies work by taking immune cells out of a patient, re-engineering them in a factory, and infusing them back. Daniel Getts spent more than a decade asking a plainer question: what if the body did that work itself?
That question is now CREATE Medicines, a clinical-stage biotech on Technology Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Getts is co-founder and chief executive. The company - known until recently as Myeloid Therapeutics - uses messenger RNA packaged in lipid nanoparticles to program immune cells directly inside the patient. No cells removed. No manufacturing detour. The instructions are delivered; the immune system follows them.
Getts is an Australian-trained immunologist. He submitted his PhD in Medicine at the University of Sydney in early 2008, then crossed to the United States for a postdoctoral year at Northwestern University in the lab of Stephen D. Miller, a leading figure in immune tolerance. He also holds an MBA from Western Michigan University, an unusual pairing that shows in how he runs a company: half bench scientist, half operator.
His path has been, by his own description, non-traditional. Rather than settling into a faculty post, he moved into building. At Tolera Therapeutics he directed research and helped push a monoclonal T-cell antibody program from discovery toward late-stage trials. He then founded Cour Pharmaceuticals as its chief scientific officer and primary inventor, working on nanoparticles that could teach the immune system to stand down in autoimmune and inflammatory disease. Cour's TIMP-GLIA program was ultimately licensed to Takeda in a deal worth $420 million plus royalties.
Our clinical work in more than 40 patients has proven that we can tolerably and repeatedly program immune cells inside the body.
Before founding his own company, Getts was VP of Research at TCR2 Therapeutics, where he led target discovery and translational work and was part of the leadership team that carried the company through a $120 million Series B and an IPO. It gave him a front-row view of how engineered T cells reach the clinic, and where the model strains: cost, complexity, and the logistics of manufacturing a bespoke therapy for each patient.
CREATE's answer is to skip the factory. The company started with myeloid cells - the immune system's first responders - and then widened its ambition. In 2025 it rebranded from Myeloid Therapeutics to CREATE Medicines, a name that signaled a broader mission: multilineage programming of T cells, natural killer cells and myeloid cells, all from a single in vivo platform. The rebrand carried a mantra the team had adopted internally, that breakthroughs come from creators, not convention.
In vivo CAR constructs designed for selective expression, the workhorses of adaptive immunity.
Natural killer cells, programmed inside the body to broaden the therapeutic reach beyond T cells.
The original focus - first responders reprogrammed to shift the immune environment.
Our ability to engineer multiple immune cell populations directly in vivo has the potential to fundamentally reshape treatment paradigms across autoimmune disease and oncology.
In May 2026 CREATE announced a $122 million Series B to advance its in vivo CAR pipeline in both autoimmune disease and oncology - two problems that look like opposites but share a single control point. In cancer the immune system needs to be pushed harder; in autoimmunity it needs to be reined in. Getts's wager is that a platform able to reprogram immune cells on demand can pull in both directions.
The company describes its approach as iterative: each clinical study is meant to inform the next. Along the way CREATE has dosed patients with MT-302, a TROP2-targeting in vivo RNA CAR, in a Phase 1 study for advanced epithelial tumors. Getts has said the clinical work across more than 40 patients showed the body's immune cells could be programmed repeatedly and tolerably, the kind of early evidence that a new modality needs before it earns bigger bets.
Getts is also widely published, with more than 45 peer-reviewed papers, including work in Nature Biotechnology, Science Translational Medicine and Nature Communications, and holds more than ten issued patents. He has served on the board of Curate Biosciences. It adds up to a career defined less by any single molecule than by a repeated move: take a hard immunology problem, build a platform around it, and get it into patients.
He pairs a PhD in Medicine with an MBA - trained in both the biology and the business of biotech.
CREATE grew from an internal belief that breakthroughs come from creators, not convention.
Across his ventures, his platforms have helped move about eleven novel therapies into clinical trials.
An immunologist and biotech entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of CREATE Medicines (formerly Myeloid Therapeutics), a Cambridge, Massachusetts company developing RNA-based in vivo immune programming therapies.
A clinical-stage biotech that uses an mRNA and lipid nanoparticle platform to program T cells, NK cells and myeloid cells directly inside the body for cancer and autoimmune disease. It was previously called Myeloid Therapeutics.
He founded Cour Pharmaceuticals as its chief scientific officer, was VP of Research at TCR2 Therapeutics, and earlier directed R&D at Tolera Therapeutics.
He holds a PhD in Medicine from the University of Sydney and an MBA from Western Michigan University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University.
In May 2026 CREATE announced a $122 million Series B, part of roughly $245 million in total funding, to advance its in vivo CAR pipeline.