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Caribou Cut a Third of Its Team to Bet the Company on Two Cancer Drugs - Here’s What Focus Costs in Biotech
The CRISPR pioneer traded a sprawling platform story for two off-the-shelf cancer therapies, a smaller herd, and a very specific test: can ready-made CAR-T match custom-built medicine before the cash clock runs out?
Best Buy Paid $400 Million for Current Health. Then Its Founder Bought the Company Back - and Narrowed the Bet
Current Health began with a wearable, grew into a hospital-at-home operating system, and became a $400 million retail-health wager. Its second act is more disciplined: help hospitals and drugmakers move the hardest care out of the building without making clinicians gamble on safety.
Legend Biotech
Legend Biotech turned an experiment from a room the size of a freight elevator into a medicine used to treat more than 10,000 people. Now it must prove that one demanding, personalized therapy can become a platform for the next generation of cancer care.
Arcellx
Arcellx rebuilt a crucial part of CAR-T therapy with a compact synthetic binder. Its lead treatment is now under FDA review - and the company behind it has become part of Gilead's Kite.
CREATE Medicines
CREATE Medicines is a Cambridge, Massachusetts clinical-stage biotech building in vivo immune programming - therapies that use an mRNA-lipid nanoparticle platform to turn a patient's own T cells, NK cells, and myeloid cells into chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) cells directly inside the body, rather than extracting and re-engineering them in a lab. Formerly Myeloid Therapeutics, the company rebranded in October 2025 as its pipeline expanded beyond myeloid cells and cancer into autoimmune disease and fibrosis. Its repeat-dosable, off-the-shelf approach aims to make CAR therapy cheaper and more scalable than conventional cell therapy, and the company says it has dosed more than 50 patients - among the largest clinical datasets for in vivo CAR to date.
Leucid Bio
Leucid Bio is a clinical-stage London biotech developing next-generation CAR-T cell therapies for refractory solid tumors. Spun out of King's College London in 2014 to commercialize two decades of research by Dr John Maher, the company's proprietary Lateral CAR platform redesigns the CAR receptor so its signalling domains sit laterally alongside the cell membrane - mimicking natural immune receptors to boost potency while reducing toxicity. Its lead candidate, LEU011, is an autologous NKG2D-targeting CAR-T therapy now in the Phase I/IIa AERIAL trial for refractory solid tumors.
Made Scientific
Made Scientific is a Princeton, New Jersey-based contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) focused exclusively on cell therapies. Formerly BioCentriq, it was rebranded in March 2025 and is backed by South Korea's GC Corporation. The company runs a 60,000 sq. ft. GMP facility with five ISO 7 / Grade B cleanrooms, offering process and analytical development, GMP manufacturing of autologous and allogeneic products, aseptic fill and finish, QC release testing, regulatory consulting, and workforce training, taking cell therapy programs from preclinical development through commercial supply.
Sanavia Oncology Inc.
Sanavia Oncology is a New York-based biotech company developing next-generation cancer immunotherapies for patients who don't benefit from existing treatments. Its proprietary platform pairs high-throughput sequencing, single-molecule super-resolution microscopy, 3D protein modeling and artificial intelligence to discover novel, clinically relevant cancer-specific epitopes in drug-resistant tumors, then generates antibodies with atomic-level specificity to those targets. The company is building antibody drug conjugates (ADCs), bispecific T cell engagers (TCEs) and CAR-T therapies - led by its SANA-01 ADC - and is backed by Two Bear Capital.
Eureka Therapeutics, Inc.
Eureka Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in Emeryville, California, developing next-generation T-cell therapies for cancer, with a focus on hard-to-treat solid tumors. Founded in 2006 by Dr. Cheng Liu, the company pairs its E-ALPHA phage-display antibody engine with its ARTEMIS T-cell receptor platform - an alternative to conventional CAR-T designed to keep engineered T cells potent inside immunosuppressive tumors while sharply reducing the inflammatory cytokine release linked to CAR-T toxicity. Its lead program, ECT204, targets GPC3-positive advanced liver cancer and has received FDA RMAT designation.
Dispatch Bio
Dispatch Bio is a Philadelphia-based cancer biotech that emerged from stealth in July 2025 with $216 million to pursue a 'universal' immunotherapy for solid tumors. Its first-in-class Flare platform uses an engineered virus to install a synthetic, tumor-specific antigen on cancer cells while remodeling the tumor's immune-suppressive environment, effectively giving CAR T cells a target where none existed. Founded in 2022 out of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and ARCH Venture Partners, the company is led by CEO Sabah Oney and counts CAR T pioneer Carl June among its scientific co-founders.
Axelyf
Axelyf is a Brookline, Massachusetts biotech (with an R&D subsidiary in Iceland) building next-generation lipid nanoparticle delivery systems for RNA medicines. Founded by former Moderna drug-delivery leaders, it pairs a proprietary AXL ionizable-lipid library with an AI model called ANNA to make RNA and gene-editing payloads reach the right tissue with higher potency and less toxicity. In mouse liver studies its AXL LNPs showed roughly 4-5x higher gene-editing efficiency than the LP-01 clinical benchmark at equivalent doses, without evidence of liver toxicity. The company closed $2.6M in seed funding in August 2025 to push its lead autoimmune program and lipid library toward preclinical and non-human-primate studies.
Ridge Bio
Ridge Biotechnologies is a Bay Area startup using AI-driven enzyme and targeted drug design to build the next generation of precision medicines. Its platform pairs proprietary machine learning models with high-throughput, cell-free wet-lab experimentation to design enzymes and delivery systems for applications spanning antibody-drug conjugates, in vivo CAR-T, targeted nucleic acid delivery, biocatalysis and radiotherapies. The company emerged from stealth in September 2025 with an oversubscribed $25 million seed round led by Sutter Hill Ventures.
Arsenal Biosciences, Inc.
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
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
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.
Wugen
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
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
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
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
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
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.