On February 9, Eli Lilly agreed to buy Orna Therapeutics for up to $2.4bn in cash, betting that one of biotech’s most powerful treatment ideas — CAR-T cell therapy — can be delivered inside the patient’s body, instead of being built in a factory-like process outside it.
If that sounds like a technical tweak, it is not. It is a direct attempt to solve the problem that has kept CAR-T both famous and rare: the therapy works, but it is hard to make, hard to deliver, and hard to scale.
For a decade, CAR-T has been a poster child for modern medicine: take a patient’s immune cells,
