Blackstone Life Sciences, Cellex Cell Professionals, and Intellia Therapeutics, Inc. Announce Management Appointments for the New Company
June 22, 2021 at 07:16 am EDT
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Blackstone announced funds managed by Blackstone Life Sciences have committed $250 million towards the launch of a new autologous and allogeneic universal chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy company, along with Intellia Therapeutics, Inc. and Cellex Cell Professionals GmbH. The new company will combine GEMoaB's clinical-stage universal CAR-T platforms with Intellia's differentiated allogeneic cell platform and CRISPR cell engineering. Andrew Schiermeier, Ph.D., current Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Intellia, will lead the launch as President and Chief Executive Officer. The new company includes a seasoned management team, including Chief Medical Officer Professor Gerhard Ehninger, a founding shareholder of GEMoaB who served as its Chief Medical Officer. Prof. Ehninger is also a founding shareholder and Chief Executive Officer of GEMoaB's parent company Cellex. Prof. Ehninger was the Head of Hematology and Oncology at University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus of the Technical University Dresden, Germany, as well as the former President of the German Society of Hematology and Oncology (DGHO). The new company has also appointed Dr. Armin Ehninger as its Chief Scientific Officer. Dr. Ehninger has served as Chief Scientific Officer of GEMoaB since 2014. The new company's Board of Directors will be chaired by Dr. Olivier Brandicourt, a Senior Advisor to Blackstone Life Sciences and the former CEO of Sanofi S.A.
Intellia Therapeutics, Inc. is a clinical-stage genome editing company, which is focused on developing curative therapeutics using Clustered, Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats/CRISPR associated 9 (CRISPR/Cas9) technology. CRISPR/Cas9 is a technology for genome editing, the process of altering selected sequences of genomic deoxyribonucleic acid. It is focused on leveraging its modular platform to advance in vivo and ex vivo therapies for diseases with high unmet need. Its lead in vivo candidate, NTLA-2001, is for the treatment of transthyretin (ATTR) amyloidosis, as well as NTLA-2002 for the treatment of hereditary angioedema (HAE) are the first CRISPR/Cas9-based therapy candidates to be administered systemically, via intravenous (IV) infusion, for precision editing of a gene in a target tissue in humans. It is also developing ex vivo applications to address immuno-oncology and autoimmune diseases.
INTELLIA THERAPEUTICS, INC. 
