Blackstone Life Sciences has put its financial muscle behind a start-up company that plans to develop allogeneic CAR T cell therapies for cancer. The US private equity group is committing $250 million to the venture, which will use T cells that have been engineered to express a universal chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) against tumour antigens. The T cells will be derived from healthy donors rather than from the patients themselves. They can also be silenced in order to avoid cytokine release syndrome.
