By Kamal Choudhury
Aug 26 (Reuters) – Bristol Myers Squibb has ended its partnership with cell therapy startup Cellares that aimed to expand the manufacturing of its personalized blood cancer therapy, a company spokesperson told Reuters on Tuesday.
Bristol Myers determined that Cellares’ cell therapy manufacturing platform, Cell Shuttle, could not meet the requirements to make its CAR-T therapy, Breyanzi, at commercial scale, the spokesperson said.
Cellares strongly disagrees with this characterization, the company told Reuters. The Cell Shuttle platform has already manufactured a Good Manufacturing Practice-compliant cell therapy product in an FDA-regulated clinical program, it said.
Personalized CAR-T therapies have transformed care for some blood cancer patients, but remain difficult and expensive to produce.
Breyanzi, first approved by the U.S. FDA in 2021, is used to treat lymphoma and other blood cancers. It generated $1.36 billion in sales in 2025.
Endpoints News first reported the development on Tuesday.
CELLARES TO CUT 100 JOBS
Cellares CEO Fabian Gerlinghaus had disclosed the loss of a “large pharmaceutical customer” in a LinkedIn post over the weekend, adding that this would force the company to “resize” its workforce.
The startup will lay off about 100 employees at its South San Francisco facility on October 20, according to a notice filed with the California Employment Development Department on August 21. It will give affected workers at least 60 days’ notice and full salary and benefits until October 20.
The notice did not mention severance packages.
Cellares did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on the layoffs.
The companies signed a deal in 2024 worth up to $380 million under which Bristol Myers reserved manufacturing capacity across the U.S., the European Union and Japan for CAR-T therapies.
Bristol Myers’ decision only applies to Breyanzi and its approved manufacturing process.
CAR-T therapies work by removing a patient’s immune cells, reprogramming them in a lab to fight cancer and infusing them back into the body.
(Reporting by Kamal Choudhury in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)
