Bengaluru company launches low-cost treatment for blood cancer

Immuneel Therapeutics, the Bengaluru-based cell and gene therapy company, has launched India's second CAR-T cell therapy Qartemi to treat patients with B-cell Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (B-NHL) - an aggressive form of blood cancer - at less than one-tenth of the price of similar therapies available in Western countries.

The Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR-T) therapy harnesses a patient's T-cell or immune cells to target and eliminate cancer, offering a new paradigm for treating aggressive blood cancers when other treatments like chemotherapy have not been effective, including cases of relapsed or refractory leukaemia and lymphoma.

Immuneel was founded by Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Indian-American oncologist and author Sidhartha Mukherjee, and life-sciences venture capitalist Kush Parmar in 2018. It acquired the exclusive rights from Hospital Clinic de Barcelona to develop and commercialise autologous ARI-0001, a CD19 - CAR-T cell therapy, in India


Immuneel initiated a clinical trial in 2022 which was conducted across Narayana Hospital in Bengaluru, Apollo Cancer Hospital in Chennai and PGIMER in Chandigarh. The results showed that the efficacy and safety of Qartemi is similar to CAR T-cell therapies approved by the USFDA.