Cell and gene therapy platform Immuneel Therapeutics is betting that a low-cost Indian model for CAR-T cancer treatment can travel beyond its home market.
The biotech firm, backed by Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, said it is preparing to expand into other markets across West Asia and Asia-Pacific, building on what it describes as encouraging early commercial traction in India.
The company on Monday announced a Series B funding round of more than ₹100 crore, with participation from new investors including Singularity AMC and Rainmatter by Zerodha, as well as existing investors Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Eight Roads Ventures and F-Prime Capital.
The funding will be used to scale up its CAR-T therapy business in India, expand internationally and advance its research pipeline. Before the latest round, Immuneel had raised about $40 million, including $12 million ( ₹100 crore) in an extended Series A round in July 2024. The company was valued at ₹488 crore as of April 2024 and has not disclosed its latest valuation.
“We’ve done over 100 patients in a commercial setting now, with very encouraging results, and tied up with more than 50 hospitals in India. We’ve just started our exports to the Middle East (West Asia),” chief executive Amit Mookim told Mint.
Based on that early traction, the company is looking to expand overseas while scaling treatment volumes in India, he said.
Immuneel commercialized its CAR-T therapy, Qartemi, in India in January 2025. The treatment is approved in India for adult patients with lymphoma and is priced at roughly a tenth of the cost of global CAR-T therapies, according to the company.
CAR-T therapy is a personalized immunotherapy that involves genetically engineering a patient’s T-cells to recognize and attack cancer cells. Unlike chemotherapy, which uses drugs that target rapidly dividing cells, CAR-T is designed to target cancer cells more precisely.
Today, CAR-T therapies are primarily used for certain difficult-to-treat blood cancers, including leukaemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma, particularly when conventional treatments have failed. Researchers are also exploring their use in autoimmune disorders.
Apart from Qartemi, India’s drug regulator has approved NexCAR19, the country’s first indigenous CAR-T therapy, developed by ImmunoACT in collaboration with Tata Memorial Centre and Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
Focus on affordability
Immuneel, which conducted India’s first CAR-T cell therapy trials in 2022, has focused on lowering the cost of what remains one of the world’s most expensive cancer treatments.
Globally, CAR-T therapy can cost between $350,000 and $700,000. Immuneel’s Qartemi is priced at about 10% of that level, or $60,000-$70,000 in India.
“The problem we’ve tried to solve is to bring scale and efficiency to the model. And we’ve tried to solve that through manufacturing innovation, through process re-engineering, through localizing the supply chain,” said Mookim.
The company is betting that its cost advantage will help it compete in other emerging markets. “We believe that there is an opportunity, having solved the problem of this cost and scale, to be able to have dialogues with these countries,” said Mookim.
He said Immuneel is evaluating several expansion models, including a hub-and-spoke manufacturing approach and partnerships with local players, while working through regulatory requirements in prospective markets.
The new capital will also be used to expand the therapy’s reach within India by adding more hospital partners and increasing manufacturing capacity.
India represents a large potential market. According to Globocan 2022 data, the country ranks third globally in reported blood cancer cases, behind the US and China, with more than 120,000 new diagnoses and 70,000 deaths annually.
Pipeline expansion
Beyond lymphoma, Immuneel is looking to broaden the use of its CAR-T platform.
“We are already treating patients with lymphoma, and we’ll soon extend the condition to leukaemia as well…we want to bring in treatments for multiple myeloma, and autoimmune disorders,” said Mookim.
The company is also exploring newer platform technologies, including allogeneic CAR-T therapies, which use immune cells from healthy donors to create off-the-shelf treatments.
Immuneel’s expansion push comes as parts of the global CAR-T industry have pulled back amid the high costs of manufacturing and commercialization.
In 2025, US-based Caribou Biosciences discontinued its early-stage autoimmune programme and reduced headcount to focus on its lead oncology assets. Companies including Allogene Therapeutics have also narrowed their focus to a smaller number of priority programmes amid funding pressures and concerns over cash burn.
In India, Aurigene Oncology, a unit of Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, discontinued its CAR-T programmes in FY26 as part of a broader portfolio rationalization.