CAR-T specialist Caribou culls pipeline and seeks exit deal
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Caribou Biosciences is halting its allogeneic CAR-T pipeline and reducing its workforce as it explores strategic exit options due to financing challenges.
Despite Nobel Prize origins, Caribou has succumbed to a sector shifting its focus to in vivo CAR-T approaches. Caribou Biosciences, a biotech developing off-the-shelf cell therapies for blood cancers, said it will discontinue its pipeline and lay off employees – a move that reflects shifting investor appetite towards in vivo approaches.
Caribou is shelving further development activities for its two allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy programmes, vispa-cel for the treatment of relapsed or refractory (R/R) B cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma and CB-011 for the treatment of R/R multiple myeloma. In line with the pipeline winddown, the company is implementing reductions to its workforce and initiating cost-cutting measures. As of February 2026, 97 people worked at the company full-time. While not disclosing how many employees will be cut, Caribou said the reductions would be “substantial”.
The biotech’s board is now seeking exit routes, including a merger, acquisition, business combination, or other deals that involve Caribou in its entirety or a transaction of assets.
In a statement on LinkedIn, CEO Rachel Haurwitz said: “Caribou’s story has taken a heartbreaking turn. This decision is not a loss of belief in our science, our clinical data, or what these programmes could mean for patients. 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.”
CAR T-cell therapy is a personalised type of immunotherapy that genetically reprogrammes a patient’s own white blood cells to identify and destroy cancer cells. Caribou’s approach takes conventional ex-vivo CAR-T and uses CRISPR genome editing to turn donor T cells into a standardised, “off-the-shelf” product.
There is a plethora of approved CAR-T products, with Gilead’s Yescarta (axicabtagene ciloleucel) and Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) Carvykti (ciltacabtagene autoleucel) the dominant drugs in oncology. However, in vivo CAR-T is starting to dominate R&D activities because it eliminates the need for expensive and convoluted manufacturing. Big pharma companies are starting to favour this approach for pipeline strategies, too. J&J, for example, inked a collaboration and potential buyout agreement with in vivo CAR-T specialist Sail Biomedicines worth up to $3.505bn in July 2026. Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, and Moderna have all also set targets on the in vivo CAR-T space.
For Caribou, the business wind-down marks a strong contrast to when it burst onto the biotech scene with so much promise. It was co-founded by Jennifer Doudna, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Emmanuelle Charpentier for their development of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing. The biotech went on to have a successful $350m IPO in the US and even received financial backing from Pfizer and AbbVie.
