About a decade ago, Mike Jensen, a pediatric oncologist at Seattle Children’s hospital, licensed to a startup his designs for a powerful new type of therapy, called CAR-T, that would re-engineer a child’s own immune cells to target cancer.
The deal proved be a mixed blessing. The therapy eventually reached market as Breyanzi, one of three CAR-Ts approved for adult leukemia. But it was never approved for childhood cancer.
The story was emblematic. Although the first CAR-T was approved in 2017 for children, after it cleared malignancies in some on the brink of death, researchers hoping to use the tool in other pediatric cancers have struggled.