Kiran Mazumdar Shaw-backed Immuneel rolls out CAR-T cancer therapy in India today, will focus on affordability

The startup, co-founded by Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, was the first company in India to conduct CAR T-cell therapy trials in 2022. The therapy, called Qartemi, is used to treat adult B-cell non-hodgkin lymphoma, and has been licensed from the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona (HCB) of Spain. CAR T-cell therapy involves genetically engineering a patient’s T cells, a type of white blood cell, to recognize and attack cancer cells more effectively.

The Bengaluru-based startup has partnered with hospitals such as Narayana Health, Apollo Hospitals, CMC Vellore, and Manipal Hospitals to administer the treatment and is in the process of partnering with more.

“In July 2024, we got the approvals to treat patients in the commercial and real world setting in India,” Amit Mookim, chief executive officer, Immuneel Therapeutics, told Mint. “And we are now in the process of training, accrediting the hospitals, starting to treat patients.”

Making strides

CAR T-cell therapy, currently used as a second or third line of treatment in India, is very nascent but the country is making strides in innovation.

Immuneel’s Qartemi is not the only product in the market. Laurus Labs and IIT Bombay-backed ImmunoACT’s CAR-T therapy was launched last year in April. Aurigene Oncology, a Dr Reddy’s subsidiary, is also working on the therapy and announced promising results from a phase 1 study for patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma in October 2024.

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India’s cancer burden is growing, with around 120,000 new blood cancer cases and over 70,000 deaths annually from leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. According to estimates by Immuneel, there are at least 1,000 to 1,500 eligible CAR-T patients in the country currently. The startup has a rigorous screening process to select patients who fit the bill and aims to address at least 20% of those patients in this calendar year, Mookim said.

As the therapy moves to being a first line of treatment in India, following the developed world, the number of patients will increase, he said. So far, about 160 patients have been treated using Qartemi, including about 140 in Europe and the rest in India.

Cost a key deterrent

The therapy is relatively nascent and comes at a high cost. Globally, it can cost anywhere between $350,000 and $700,000.

Immuneel has brought down the cost to about $60,000-70,000 in India. At anywhere between ₹51 lakh to ₹60 lakh, this is still prohibitive for a majority of Indians.

“It’s too early [to tell] whether Indian patients or doctors would adopt this kind of treatment, because of the high cost,” Tausif Shaikh, India analyst- pharma and healthcare, BNP Paribas, told Mint.

Immuneel is working on innovation and lowering manufacturing costs to make it more affordable in India. “One of the ways in which we are [looking at] bringing the input costs down is whether we can locally manufacture some of the input materials, because a lot of the reagents and the input materials are imported currently,” Mookim said. They’re also looking at bringing down logistics costs.

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“We follow global standards to ship the product. We will continue to do that, but over a period of time, as the product becomes more stable, we’ll try and see how we could bring some of those costs down as well,” he added.

The startup sees India being at the forefront of CAR T-cell therapy innovation. “We have very deep investments in manufacturing…we are constantly retesting and testing to ensure global quality and also doing a lot of innovation,” Siddhartha Mukherjee, director and co-founder, Immuneel Therapeutics, told Mint. “India will become, and has already become, one of the manufacturing innovation hubs for CAR-T therapy. So it would be a lot of innovation in that area in the future…but quality and efficacy [must] come first.”

The startup, founded in 2019, raised ₹100 crore in funding in July 2024 in an extended Series A funding round and was valued at ₹488 crore as of April 2024.

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