Caribou Biosciences, the off-the-shelf cell therapy outfit that spun out of Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna’s lab in 2011, is halting all development of its pipeline and laying off employees as it seeks strategic alternatives.
Potential outcomes include a merger, acquisition or sale of assets or the entire company, Caribou explained in an Oct. 6 press release. The Bay Area biotech had $113.8 million on hand as of June 30.
In the meantime, the company is discontinuing all clinical development activities and implementing a “substantial reduction in workforce, which is expected to be mostly complete in the fourth quarter of 2026.” Caribou—which numbered 97 full-time employees as of the end of February—didn't specify how many people are likely to be affected.
“Today, Caribou’s story has taken a heartbreaking turn,” CEO Rachel Haurwitz, Ph.D., wrote in an accompanying LinkedIn post. “As our board considers potential paths forward for the company and its assets, we hope there may be an opportunity for these off-the-shelf CAR-T cell therapies to be advanced by other organizations with the resources, capabilities and commitment required.”
While traditional CAR-T cell therapies engineer T cells taken from patients, Caribou was pursuing an allogeneic, or donor-derived, approach that uses cells taken from healthy individuals. The idea was that using cells from donors would eliminate lengthy manufacturing times and make the CAR-T’s success less dependent on the quality of the patient's own T cells.
Caribou’s two programs, vispa-cel and CB-011, were in phase 1 development for lymphoma and multiple myeloma, respectively, both diseases already addressed by patient-derived CAR-Ts. This summer, Caribou reported that vispa-cel matched Bristol Myers Squibb’s Breyanzi and Kite Pharma’s Yescarta in median progression-free survival in its phase 1 trial.
Vispa-cel, Haurwitz noted in yesterday's post, “is the first allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy to demonstrate safety, efficacy and durability on par with autologous CAR-T cell therapies.” The company had already agreed with the FDA on the design of a pivotal phase 3 trial for the therapy, she added.
“This decision is not a loss of belief in our science, our clinical data or what these programs could mean for patients,” Haurwitz wrote. “It reflects the difficult reality that the current financing environment for allogeneic CAR-T cell therapies has made it impossible to secure the capital required to responsibly advance them.”
The enthusiasm among investors and acquirers in the cell therapy space has lately favored in vivo methods that use gene editing to turn a patient’s T cells against their disease, without cells ever needing to be extracted from their body. An array of heavyweight drugmakers have entered the in vivo arena, including Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Moderna, often aiming at both cancer and autoimmune diseases.
The rise of in vivo has forced allogeneic CAR-T biotechs to endure something of a “nuclear winter” of late when it comes to securing funding. While Allogene Therapeutics has found a potential path to approval in lymphoma by targeting cancer cells that linger after chemotherapy, off-the-shelf CAR-T stalwart Cellectis—whose CEO told Fierce earlier this year that 2026 would bring “huge momentum” for the field—has itself since pivoted to in vivo approaches.
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