Arsenal Biosciences (ArsenalBio) is a clinical-stage, programmable cell therapy company in South San Francisco engineering CAR-T cell therapies for solid tumors. By combining CRISPR genome engineering, synthetic biology, high-throughput target discovery and machine learning, it builds 'integrated circuit T cells' that carry logic gates and multiple drug functions to attack tumors while sparing healthy tissue. Founded in 2019 by surgeon-executive Ken Drazan with leading academic immunologists, the company has raised roughly $850M total, including an oversubscribed $325M Series C in 2024 backed by ARCH, NVIDIA's NVentures, Regeneron Ventures and Bristol Myers Squibb.
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.
CellFE is an Alameda, California biotechnology company building microfluidics-based, non-viral cell-engineering instruments and consumables. Its Ryva mechanoporation platform squeezes cells through microfluidic channels to transiently open their membranes and deliver gene-editing payloads (mRNA, CRISPR-RNP, DNA vectors) in under 10 milliseconds, aiming to preserve cell health and viability where viral vectors and electroporation fall short. The goal is to make lifesaving cell therapies such as CAR-T faster, cheaper, and more scalable to manufacture.
Andrew Schiermeier is the President and CEO of AvenCell Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Dresden, Germany building switchable, universal CAR-T cell therapies for hard-to-treat cancers like acute myeloid leukemia. An engineer-turned-operator with a Harvard PhD in applied mathematics, he spent two decades across startups and global pharma - five years at CRISPR pioneer Intellia Therapeutics rising to COO, and a stint running Merck KGaA's oncology business across 60-plus countries - before taking AvenCell's helm in 2021 and leading its $112 million Series B in 2024.
Ken Drazan is the Chairman, CEO and co-founder of Arsenal Biosciences (ArsenalBio), a South San Francisco clinical-stage company building computationally designed, programmable T-cell therapies to attack solid tumors. A board-certified liver transplant surgeon turned operator and investor, he previously was President and Chief Business Officer of GRAIL (acquired by Illumina), founded the robotic surgery company Verb Surgical (acquired by Johnson & Johnson), and co-founded the private equity firm Bertram Capital. At ArsenalBio he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and forged collaborations with Bristol Myers Squibb and Genentech, betting that gene-edited 'integrated circuit' T cells - and an AI foundation model of the T cell - can turn cell therapy into something curative for cancers that have resisted it.
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.
Marc Lajoie is a protein designer turned biotech CEO. He co-founded Outpace Bio in 2021 in Seattle, where he is chief executive, building engineered cell therapies that aim to bring the kind of cures seen in blood cancers to the solid tumors that make up the vast majority of cancer cases. Trained in George Church's genome-engineering lab at Harvard and David Baker's Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, Lajoie helped pioneer the design of proteins with moving parts - molecules that compute, switch, and make decisions inside living cells. Outpace raised a $144M oversubscribed Series B in 2024 to push its AI-powered, protein-designed therapies toward the clinic.
Wugen is a clinical-stage biotechnology company in St. Louis engineering off-the-shelf, allogeneic cell therapies for cancer. Spun out of Washington University in St. Louis in 2018, it builds CRISPR-edited CAR-T cells and cytokine-induced memory NK cells designed to be manufactured once from healthy donors and delivered to many patients. Its lead program, WU-CART-007 (soficabtagene geleucel), is a CD7-targeted allogeneic CAR-T in a pivotal trial for relapsed/refractory T-cell leukemia and lymphoma, carrying FDA Breakthrough Therapy, RMAT, Fast Track, Orphan Drug and Rare Pediatric Disease designations.
Zafrens is a San Diego biotechnology company building an ultra-high-throughput single-cell platform that isolates, images, runs assays on, and sequences millions of individual cells per day. Its Z-Screen technology swaps the conventional 96-well plate for a credit-card-sized plastic chip holding 50,000 to 200,000 microwells, each with integrated imaging and multi-omic sequencing. By linking perturbation to genotype, phenotype and function at single-cell resolution, Zafrens compresses multiple stages of drug discovery into a single benchtop experiment - a 500x to 2,000x jump in the number of experiments a scientist can run at one timepoint.
Aleta Biotherapeutics is a Natick, Massachusetts immuno-oncology company building CAR T Engagers (CTEs) - simple biologic proteins that make existing CAR-T cell therapies work better. Its lead drug, ALETA-001, bridges a patient's CD19-targeted CAR T-cells to CD20 on cancer cells, aiming to rescue patients who relapse after standard CAR-T treatment for B-cell cancers. Founded in 2015 by Paul Rennert and Roy Lobb, the company is running a Phase 1/2 trial in the UK with Cancer Research UK and reported encouraging early data in December 2025.
Kytopen is a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech and MIT spinout building Flowfect, a non-viral, continuous-flow platform that uses fluid flow plus electric fields to deliver mRNA, DNA and CRISPR payloads into cells. The technology aims to engineer hundreds of billions of cells in minutes, removing a major bottleneck in discovering, developing and manufacturing advanced cell therapies like CAR-T and NK-cell treatments.
Simcha Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in New Haven, Connecticut that uses directed evolution to engineer next-generation cytokine immunotherapies for cancer. Its lead program, ST-067, is a first-in-class 'decoy-resistant' interleukin-18 (IL-18) variant engineered to evade the natural decoy protein (IL-18BP) that tumors exploit to silence the immune system. Spun out of Aaron Ring's lab at Yale School of Medicine and backed by $40M in Series B financing, Simcha is advancing ST-067 through Phase 1/2 trials in solid tumors and partnering with Janssen to armor CAR T cell therapies.
Cellares is the first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) for cell therapy. Its Cell Shuttle - a fully automated, high-throughput platform roughly the size of a small conference room - replaces a warren of manual labs with one box that can run 16 patient batches in parallel, cutting labor and facility footprint by about 90 percent.
Fabian Gerlinghaus is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cellares, a South San Francisco biotech company building the world's first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) for cell therapy. An aerospace engineer turned life-science entrepreneur, he co-founded Cellares in 2019 after spotting a critical gap: FDA-approved CAR-T therapies were sitting ready while patients died on waitlists because manufacturing couldn't scale. His Cell Shuttle platform — a fully automated, factory-in-a-box system processing 16 patient batches simultaneously — has attracted $630M in funding, a $380M partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb, and FDA's Advanced Manufacturing Technology designation. TIME magazine named it one of 2025's most important inventions.
Srini Akkaraju, MD/PhD, is the Founder and Managing General Partner of Samsara BioCapital, a Palo Alto-based venture capital firm he founded in 2016 to translate cutting-edge biology into transformative therapeutics. With a Stanford MD/PhD in Immunology and a computer science foundation from Rice University, Akkaraju has spent over 25 years at the intersection of science and capital - from corporate development at Genentech to partnership roles at J.P. Morgan Partners, Panorama Capital, New Leaf Venture Partners, and Sofinnova Ventures. Samsara has built a portfolio of 93+ companies with 32 IPO exits, backing breakthroughs in immunotherapy, cell therapy, kidney disease, and gene therapy. His conviction-driven approach is evident in moves like a $19M personal stake in Scholar Rock, and his belief that biotech is entering an 'unbelievable innovation cycle' over the next two to three decades.
Cheng Liu is the founder, President, and CEO of Eureka Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company based in Emeryville, California. A molecular cell biologist trained at UC Berkeley and Peking University, Liu invented a novel class of TCR mimic antibodies that allow engineered T cells to recognize intracellular tumor antigens - a major challenge in treating solid tumors. Since founding Eureka in 2006 after a decade at Chiron/Novartis, he has built a pipeline of ARTEMIS T-cell therapies targeting liver cancer, multiple myeloma, and neuroblastoma, with the company's ECT204 program earning FDA RMAT Designation in January 2026 - one of the highest-priority designations the FDA gives to regenerative medicine therapies. Eureka has raised over $168 million in total funding and holds more than 500 patents worldwide.
Rachel Haurwitz is the President and CEO of Caribou Biosciences, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company she co-founded in 2011 with Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna and colleagues Martin Jinek and James Berger. A pioneer in CRISPR commercialization, Haurwitz earned her PhD from UC Berkeley under Doudna's mentorship — she was the first student in the lab to work on CRISPR — and pivoted from academia to industry to bring genome-editing technology to patients. Under her leadership, Caribou has developed a proprietary Cas12a-based platform (chRDNA technology) enabling precise, multiplex genome editing for off-the-shelf allogeneic CAR-T and CAR-NK cell therapies targeting blood cancers and autoimmune diseases. She also co-founded Intellia Therapeutics in 2014 and has been recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30, Fortune 40 Under 40, and featured in Walter Isaacson's bestseller 'The Code Breaker.'
Rami Elghandour is Chairman and CEO of Arcellx (NASDAQ: ACLX), a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing next-generation cell therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases. An engineer turned venture capitalist turned serial CEO, he has led two successful IPOs, built two multibillion-dollar public companies, and raised over $1.75 billion in capital. At Arcellx, he transformed the company from an early-stage startup into a commercial-ready organization with a peak valuation exceeding $6 billion, advancing the anito-cel BCMA CAR-T therapy toward FDA approval for relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma. A TEDx speaker on unconscious bias and gender equity, Rami is also an executive producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary 'The Voice of Hind Rajab' and the Sundance-premiered 'American Doctor.'
Kevin Parker, Ph.D. is the co-founder and CEO of Cartography Biosciences, a South San Francisco-based oncology company using single-cell genomics and AI to map the tumor antigen landscape and build precision immunotherapies. A Harvard and Stanford alumnus who founded the company straight out of his PhD, Parker has raised $124M in total funding, struck a landmark collaboration with Gilead Sciences, received FDA IND approval for his lead drug CBI-1214, and dosed the first patient in a Phase 1 colorectal cancer trial in early 2026 - all before most scientists finish a second postdoc.