AvenCell Therapeutics is a clinical-stage cell therapy company building switchable, universal CAR-T treatments that can be turned 'off' and 'on' even after they are inside a patient. By pairing this controllable switch with a CRISPR-engineered, off-the-shelf allogeneic platform, AvenCell aims to widen the narrow safety window of conventional CAR-T while cutting the cost and wait time of manufacturing, targeting hard-to-treat blood cancers like AML, B-cell malignancies and, increasingly, autoimmune disease.
HebeCell Corp is a Natick, Massachusetts biotech developing allogeneic, off-the-shelf cell therapies grown from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Its core invention is a suspension-bioreactor platform, ProtoNK, that produces natural killer (NK) cells indefinitely and at scale - a manufacturing approach the company says no other lab can match. Founded in 2016, HebeCell aims to make cancer and degenerative-disease therapies cheaper, safer, and available without a matched donor, under the tagline 'Incurable no more.'
Morphocell Technologies is a Montreal-area regenerative medicine company building allogeneic, stem cell-derived engineered tissues to treat severe organ deficiencies, starting with the liver. Its lead program, ReLiver, is a transiently implanted engineered liver tissue made from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) intended to treat acute and acute-on-chronic liver failure without immunosuppression. Spun out of CHU Sainte-Justine in 2018, the company has raised US$50 million in Series A funding and runs vertically integrated operations spanning discovery, cell manufacturing and preclinical development.
Kumar Srinivasan is the President and CEO of Wugen, a St. Louis clinical-stage biotech building off-the-shelf memory NK and CAR-T cell therapies for cancer. A chemist turned dealmaker, he spent 25+ years in pharma and biotech business development, most notably engineering the partnering strategy at Turning Point Therapeutics that culminated in its $4.1 billion acquisition by Bristol Myers Squibb. Since taking Wugen's helm in March 2023, he has steered its lead programs WU-CART-007 and WU-NK-101 into pivotal and early clinical trials.
Orca Bio is a late-stage biotechnology company in Menlo Park, California, building high-precision allogeneic cell therapies. Its proprietary single-cell sorting platform purifies donor immune and stem cells to engineer optimized therapeutic mixtures aimed at curing blood cancers and autoimmune diseases, with its lead candidate Orca-T currently under FDA priority review.