“Today, we are able to manufacture… as short as one day, which is probably the best in the world that I’m aware of,” MD and CEO Bikash Verma told ET, contrasting it with global industry benchmarks where “it was taking four, six, eight weeks to manufacture for one patient.”
CAR T-cell therapy is a personalised immunotherapy, used in advanced malignancies, that genetically reprograms a patient’s own white blood cells (T cells) to destroy cancer cells.
On the product development side, the company has partnered with Cipla to bring its blood cancer CAR-T therapy to India. “Cipla will be branding, putting its own brand name,” Verma said, adding that the pharma major will handle commercialisation once approvals are secured.
Verma said the company, incorporated in India in 2020, had support from late Ratan Tata. “Chandra himself (N. Chandrasekaran, Executive Chairman of Tata Sons) has been very gracious in guiding us and has taken a strong interest in this,” said Verma.
“They (Tata Sons) are one of the largest equity holders. They are strategic partners also. They advise us on a day-to-day basis,” he said.
MedTherapy, which has its technologycentre in Boston, US, and globalmanufacturing facility in New Delhi NCR, operates with two separate business units including a CDMO (Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization) to manufacture CAR-T cell therapies, while it also co-develops its own new CAR-T therapy products.The company’s CAR-T focused CDMO facility in Noida, which it positions as India’s first dedicated gene therapy manufacturing hub, currently has capacity to manufacture therapies for nearly 5,000 patients annually and is already operational for partner programmes in India and abroad, he said.
The company is planning a major expansion. It is in discussions with the Uttar Pradesh government for land to build a larger facility that could scale capacity to 50,000-100,000 patients per year. If realised, Verma said, this would be among the largest gene therapy manufacturing hubs globally.
“We have completed all the certifications needed in India or globally to be functioning as a CDMO,” including approvals and inspections from domestic agencies such as the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation, Department of Biotechnology and ICMR, he said.
CAR-T therapies globally cost between $400,000-600,000 per treatment, with total treatment expenses in the US often exceeding $1 million per patient. Verma said MedTherapy’s objective is to fundamentally alter this cost structure and make it one of the “lowest in the world.”
India currently has a handful of approved CAR-T therapies like NexCAR19 developed by ImmunoAct (a spin-off of IIT Bombay and Tata Memorial Hospital) and Qartemi by Immuneel Therapeutics (co-founded by Biocon’s Kiran Mazumder Shaw and renowned US-based oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee). Both therapies cost roughly about Rs 40-50 lakhs, a fraction of the Western markets.
While Verma did not specify the exact cost of MedTherapy’s treatments, but said: “This is going to be almost to the affordability of a common patient today and tomorrow one of the lowest in the world that’s possible.”
Beyond blood cancers, MedTherapy is developing advanced “armoured CAR-T” therapies for solid tumours including lung, breast, brain and bone cancers — a category where CAR-T therapies have historically struggled.
While the blood cancer programme is in Phase II clinical trials in India, the solid tumour pipeline is in Phase I. Verma said early results are promising, without quoting specific data.
The company has been working in collaboration with twenty-two global organisations in India, US, Canada, and Europe including Harvard University, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Kokilaben Hospital, among others.