Caribou Biosciences is winnowing down for the second time in the last year, dropping a leukemia CAR-T asset and laying off 32% of staff to home in on two lead allogeneic cell therapy candidates.
The layoffs and pipeline reprioritization are expected to cost the California company between $2.5 million and $3.5 million but will extend Caribou’s cash runway by one year to the second half of 2027, the biotech said in an April 24 release.
Based on a preliminary audit, Caribou said it expects to report $212.5 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities as of March 31, 2025.
“To ensure Caribou is strongly positioned to emerge from these challenging times and deliver these potentially value-generating datasets, we have made the difficult decision to strategically prioritize our resources on CB-010 and CB-011 for oncology indications,” Caribou President and CEO Rachel Haurwitz, Ph.D., said in the release. “These strategic decisions resulted in a reduction in Caribou’s workforce, which include some of the industry’s most talented scientists and professionals.”
Left on the chopping block is CB-012, an allogeneic anti-CLL-1 CAR-T cell therapy designed to treat relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia. Caribou is ending CB-012’s phase 1 trial, which began in February 2024. CB-012, which had previously garnered a fast track designation from the FDA, is no longer listed on Caribou’s pipeline.
The company is also ending preclinical research activities.
Both CB-010 and CB-011 are also CAR-T therapies currently in phase 1 trials. CD19-targeted CB-010 is being evaluated for B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma and anti-BCMA candidate CB-011 for multiple myeloma. The company initially intended to unveil results from these trials in the first half of 2025 but is now pushing back those announcement plans to the second half of the year, according to the release.
Caribou is also pulling the plug on another phase 1 trial testing CB-010 in lupus, the company said, .
The pipeline purge comes less than a year after Caribou cut 12% of staff and ended its natural killer cell therapy program in July 2024.
The latest Caribou cuts continue a trend from the first quarter of the year, which saw 20 layoff rounds conducted at cell and gene therapy companies. These included almost all full-time staff at macrophage cell therapy biotech Carisma Therapeutics, which has now ceased all research and development activities and is pursuing strategic alternatives.