Immuneel's CAR-T cell therapy reports positive in early phase-2 trials in India

Immuneel, the cell and gene therapy startup, which is developing chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell therapy Varnimcabtagene, on Tuesday said the early results from India’s first phase 2 clinical trials have demonstrated 77% overall response rate at 90th day in patients with blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma.

The early results from the IMAGINE study were based on the first 10 patients of the planned 24 patients to be enrolled.

Both adult and children with acute leukemia as well as lymphoma patients post median 2 lines of treatment, including in post-transplant settings were enrolled.


Around 80% of patients experienced complete clinical response at Day 28. At Day 90, the results from IMAGINE showed an overall response rate of 77%, with 6 out of 9 evaluable patients demonstrating complete responses.

Day 28 and Day 90 read-outs in the B Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia patients indicate 100% and 83% complete remissions indicating rapid, deep and sustained responses.

The median time to manufacture and release Varnimcabtagene was 12 days, with 100% manufacturing success.

Imuneel was co-founded by Biocon chairperson Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, renowned cancer physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Kush Parmar, managing partner, 5AM Venture, is working on developing its own pipeline of chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapies and other cellular immunotherapies for treating cancer.