Pfizer, Cellectis In Immunotherapy Pact

Pfizer will pay the Paris-based biotech Cellectis $80 million and take a roughly $30 million equity stake in the firm for access to its chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) immunotherapy technology. Pfizer gains exclusive rights to use the CAR-T platform to develop oncology therapies for 15 targets it selects and the right to option therapies based on four targets picked by Cellectis. CAR-T therapy typically involves engineering a patient’s own T cells—a type of white blood cell—to attack cancer cells. Cellectis has found a way to use T cells from a single donor in multiple patients.