Catamaran Bio: CAR NK biotech Catamaran Bio to wind down, will seek partners for cell therapies

Off-the-shelf cell therapy biotech Catamaran Bio made a "recent decision to commence wind-down," CEO Alvin Shih told Endpoints News in an email on Monday. The Boston biotech will cease day-to-day operations and seek strategic partners for its CAR NK cell therapy candidates and technology, Shih wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. Catamaran had 19 employees as of Monday morning, he told Endpoints, and a "handful" will stay on for a transition period. Alvin Shih Catamaran was unveiled in November 2020 with $42 million in funding from SV Health Investors, Sofinnova Partners, Lightstone Ventures, Takeda Ventures and Astellas Venture Management. "We still believe strongly in the potential of allogeneic therapies to address unmet needs in solid tumor indications," Shih wrote on LinkedIn. "However, the financing environment for early stage companies like ours in the cell therapy space continues to be challenging, and the time and resources required to achieve a meaningful clinical readout made it impossible for us to proceed on our intended path." Biotechs in the same space as Catamaran are attempting to engineer natural killer cell therapies using donor cells, rather than going through the costly and time-intensive process associated with existing CAR-T therapies that take from a patient's own cells. Takeda is working on a program out of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and other biotechs are also operating in the space, like Fate Therapeutics, Caribou Biosciences, NKGen Biotech, Shoreline Biosciences and Nkarta, among others. Catamaran was developing its so-called TAILWIND platform, which included synthetic biology, non-viral cell engineering and other technologies. The biotech had planned on testing a CD70 cell therapy, dubbed CAT-248, in patients with renal cell carcinoma. It also envisioned studies of a HER2 cell therapy, named CAT-179, in patients with breast and gastric cancers. Shih led Catamaran as CEO after Eli Lilly bought his previous company, neuroscience startup Disarm Therapeutics, in 2020. Catamaran is chaired by Frank Lee, who recently joined Pacira BioSciences as CEO after leading Forma Therapeutics to an exit to Novo Nordisk in 2022. The company's scientific founders include George Washington University professor Catherine Bollard and University of Minnesota professor Branden Moriarity. Other founders include Kevin Pojasek, Tim Harris and Houman Ashrafian, who recently left SV Health Investors to become EVP and head of R&D at Sanofi.