One of the hottest areas of cancer new product development is adoptive cell therapy and, in particular, the development of CAR modified natural killer cells (CAR-NK).

Which company will win the CAR-NK race?

We’re all familiar with CAR modified T cells, several of which are now FDA approved, while the next group of immune cells to receive renewed attention as a therapeutic are natural killer cells. They have unique properties and may have a role to play in the next generation of cancer immunotherapies.

While it’s still early days for CAR-NK cell therapy, if we have learnt anything from the first era of cancer immunotherapy it’s that we won’t know what will or won’t work, or even how durable any responses may be until we go into the clinic. Even then, it will probably not be until phase 2 multi-center trial readouts before we gain a sense of the real potential.

In the meantime, several companies are looking to ride the CAR-NK wave, and in this post, we’re highlighting a relatively recent newcomer, Catamaran Bio, who launched in November 2020 with a $42M series A round funding.

Recently, BSB spoke with Chief Scientific Officer, Vipin Suri PhD, about their preclinical data at AACR22 and the science behind their approach.

This is the second in our latest mini-series on CAR-NK cell therapy, where we explore the various challenges and opportunities in this emerging field.

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