1. Why it matters
India carries a disproportionate share of the world’s genetic disease burden, including one of the largest populations living with sickle cell disease, thalassemia, and other inherited blood disorders, alongside a fast-rising cancer caseload. The global gene-editing and cell-therapy industry, meanwhile, has produced treatments priced in the millions of dollars, out of reach for all but a small number of patients worldwide. Rather than wait for prices to fall, a cluster of Indian companies, research institutes, and public-private partnerships have chosen to build their own manufacturing pipelines, often at a fraction of comparable Western cost. This ecosystem spans four broad categories: cell and gene therapy developers, gene-editing research institutes, genomics and diagnostics companies, and precision oncology platforms.
2. Policy Foundations
None of the organizations profiled here operate in a regulatory vacuum. Since 2019, CDSCO, ICMR, and DBT have jointly issued National Guidelines for Gene Therapy Product Development and Clinical Trials, setting the safety and ethical framework companies like ImmunoACT and Cellogen must work within.
In August 2024, the Union Cabinet approved the BioE3 Policy (Biotechnology for Economy, Environment and Employment), India’s first comprehensive national biomanufacturing policy. It names “precision biotherapeutics,” including gene-based therapies and advanced vaccines, as a priority domain, and has funded a National Biofoundry Network, Bio-AI Hubs, and dozens of proposal calls meant to move lab-scale innovation toward commercial manufacturing. DBT has separately funded lentiviral vector and plasmid platforms for companies such as ImmunoACT under this framework, part of a broader push to reduce dependence on imported vectors and raw materials.
Older schemes run alongside BioE3: the World Bank co-funded National Biopharma Mission supports vaccine, biopharmaceutical, and diagnostic development, while BIRAC’s BioNEST incubator network has helped start more than 100 biotech incubation centres nationally, including the IIT Bombay incubator that gave rise to ImmunoACT.
3. ImmunoACT
ImmunoACT (formally Immunoadoptive Cell Therapy Private Limited) is arguably the company most responsible for India’s arrival on the global advanced-therapy map. It develops NexCAR19, a CD19-targeted CAR-T therapy, and has since expanded into a pipeline spanning blood cancers, solid tumours, and autoimmune disease.
Founded in 2018 as a spin-off from IIT Bombay’s Biosciences and Bioengineering department, the company built on lab research that began as early as 2013. Dr. Rahul Purwar, an Associate Professor at IIT Bombay, serves as Founder and CEO, alongside co-founders Shirish Arya and Atharva Karulkar. Incubated through IIT Bombay’s SINE and BIRAC’s BioNest programme, ImmunoACT counts Laurus Labs among its key investors and has raised roughly $15.9 million across five rounds.
What it has built:
- NexCAR19 (Talicabtagene autoleucel), a humanized CD19-targeted CAR-T therapy for relapsed or refractory B-cell Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and B-cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia, India’s first CDSCO-approved CAR-T therapy, cleared in October 2023.
- A proprietary lentiviral vector and plasmid manufacturing platform, giving the company in-house control over the delivery system used to re-engineer patient T cells, rather than relying on imports.
- A pipeline of additional candidates, including HCAR2 for multiple myeloma and HCAr3 for glioblastoma and neuroblastoma, plus a TriCAR-T programme co-developed with the U.S. non-profit Caring Cross.
- A 200-litre GMP-grade production platform, funded in part through DBT’s BioE3-linked biomanufacturing initiative and intended to scale annual capacity into the thousands of patients.
NexCAR19 has become something of a symbol for India’s “Atmanirbhar” (self-reliant) biotech ambitions. In November 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was presented with the therapy at the ESTIC 2025 conclave, alongside two quantum computing innovations; the Ministry of Science and Technology has called it India’s “first living drug.” Coverage from outlets like PackGene Biotech and Business Standard has focused less on the science than on reach and pricing: by late 2025, the therapy had reportedly gone to more than 600 patients across 90-plus partner centres, and ImmunoACT had partnered with Cipla to extend access into Africa. A December 2025 deal with Mango Sciences added a bridge-financing option meant to ease affordability at the point of care.
4. Immuneel Therapeutics
While ImmunoACT grew out of an academic lab, Immuneel Therapeutics was built from the start as a commercial cell-therapy platform, founded in Bengaluru in 2018–2019 by three prominent figures: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw of Biocon, oncologist and author Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, and physician-investor Dr. Kush M. Parmar of 5AM Ventures. CEO Amit Mookim now leads the company. In June 2026, Immuneel raised over ₹100 crore in a Series B round led by Singularity AMC and Rainmatter by Zerodha, with existing backers Eight Roads Ventures and F-Prime Capital also participating, to fund international expansion.
Rather than developing a CAR-T therapy from scratch, Immuneel licensed ARI-0001 (IMN-003A) from Hospital Clínic de Barcelona and IDIBAPS in Spain, a product already approved there by AEMPS, and rebuilt manufacturing around it in Bengaluru. The result, Qartemi, is described as India’s first globally benchmarked CD19-directed CAR-T therapy. It’s produced at what the company says is India’s first cGMP-approved, integrated cell-therapy facility, established in 2021 at the Mazumdar-Shaw Cancer Centre within Narayana Health City. The IMAGINE trial, launched in 2022, was India’s first industry-sponsored CAR-T clinical trial, enrolling pediatric and adult patients with relapsed or refractory B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Immuneel also runs CellSpectrum, a patient- and clinician-facing education resource.
The company has picked up international recognition beyond India: “Most Promising Cell & Gene Therapy Startup in APAC” at the 2023 Asia Pacific Cell & Gene Therapy Excellence Awards, an “Innovation in Cell and Gene Therapy” award at Boston’s Endpoints 11 Awards, and the CGCS Pioneers Award in China. Coverage of the 2026 Series B round framed it as a sign that India could play a larger role in shaping global cell-therapy manufacturing.
5. Cellogen Therapeutics
Cellogen, based in Noida, occupies a different niche. Its bispecific, third-generation CAR-T platform targets the problem of relapse after single-antigen CAR-T therapy, and it separately pursues gene-editing approaches to hemoglobinopathies such as sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia.
Dr. Gaurav Kharya, who directs a Delhi hospital’s bone marrow transplant and cellular therapy unit, co-founded the company with Dr. Tanveer Ahmad after years of treating pediatric patients for whom CAR-T was financially out of reach. NATCO Pharma invested $2 million for a 5.38% stake; Cellogen is targeting cost reductions of up to 90% relative to global CAR-T pricing.
Its platform is engineered to recognise CD19 and CD20 simultaneously, reducing the odds that cancer escapes detection by losing just one target, a design the company has secured patent approval for. Alongside this, Cellogen runs preclinical CRISPR and vector-based programmes aimed at recreating hereditary persistence of fetal hemoglobin, plus a smaller line of business in QC testing kits and AI-assisted manufacturing tools, which it hopes to license separately.
IIT Madras’s Shaastra magazine profiled the company’s belief in terms of “antigen escape”, the phenomenon where cancer returns because it now expresses an antigen the original engineered T cell no longer recognises. Inc42’s 2026 feature situated Cellogen within India’s broader landscape, noting its strategy of building three potential revenue streams (the therapy, its QC kits, and its AI tools) before a single patient has been dosed.
6. BIRSA 101
Unlike the three private companies above, BIRSA 101 comes from a government research institute paired with India’s largest vaccine manufacturer, and represents the country’s first indigenous CRISPR-based gene-editing therapy.
It was developed at CSIR-IGIB in Delhi, under Director Dr. Souvik Maiti, with support from the Department of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Tribal Affairs. In November 2025, CSIR-IGIB signed a technology-transfer agreement with the Serum Institute of India, represented by Executive Director Dr. Umesh Shaligram, under which SII will scale manufacturing and run later-stage trials. Union Minister Dr. Jitendra Singh launched the therapy; its name honours Birsa Munda, whose 150th birth anniversary fell the same month, a deliberate nod, given how disproportionately sickle cell disease affects tribal communities in states like Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha.
The therapy is a CRISPR-Cas9-based, one-time edit intended to correct the sickle cell mutation directly, described by officials as “precise genetic surgery.” A Phase 1 trial in a small screened cohort is expected to be followed by Phase 2/3 trials under SII, with regulatory review some years off. On price, the ambition is stark: where Casgevy costs upwards of ₹20–25 crore per patient, BIRSA 101 is projected at roughly ₹50 lakh, a gap of nearly two orders of magnitude, and one that echoes India’s vaccine-manufacturing history.
Coverage has skewed toward policy and current-affairs outlets, PIB, ForumIAS, Drishti IAS, and ORF among them, largely for the therapy’s dual significance as both a scientific and a social-equity story. ORF ties it to the National Sickle Cell Anaemia Elimination Mission, launched in 2023 with a 2047 target, noting that trial participants are expected to be drawn mainly from central and eastern India.
7. The Diagnostics and Data Layer
Three companies in this ecosystem never touch a therapy directly, but the therapies arguably couldn’t function without them.
MedGenome, South Asia’s largest genomics and genetic-testing company, was founded in 2013 by Sam Santhosh, Mahesh Pratapneni, and Sreedhar Santhosh, with Dr. Vedam Ramprasad later joining as CEO of the diagnostics business. Santhosh has since founded SciGenom and AgriGenome Labs; Pratapneni also founded Emerge Ventures and the GenomeAsia 100K initiative. Headquartered in Bengaluru with a U.S. presence in Foster City, MedGenome has raised about $264 million across ten rounds from investors including Peak XV Partners, Novo Holdings, and HDFC. Its lab runs over 1,300 tests spanning oncology, rare disease, reproductive genetics, cardiology, neurology, and ophthalmology, and it claims several firsts: India’s first NGS-validated NIPT panel calibrated for the Indian population, KaryoSeq for chromosomal abnormality detection, and a polygenic risk score test for coronary artery disease. BioVoiceNews has run repeated leadership profiles; a widely shared Scispot interview with Ramprasad traced the company’s founding motivation to a perceived genomics accessibility gap around 2008–2010.
Strand Life Sciences, by contrast, builds computational infrastructure rather than running wet labs. Co-founded by Dr. Ramesh Hariharan, also an adjunct professor at IISc Bangalore, where Strand is headquartered, the company has spent more than 25 years building tools for high-throughput molecular profiling, cited across thousands of publications. Its roughly 300–500-person team supports a near-automated oncology panel reporting platform, HIPAA and FDA-compliant software for U.S. diagnostic partners, CAP-accredited capabilities for single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, and AI-driven digital histopathology infrastructure built with TileDB. Much of its public writing appears on its own technical blog, including client testimonials from institutions like the University of Chicago describing its role in cohort recruitment and liquid-biopsy validation.
4baseCare, the newest of the three, builds AI and genomic-profiling tools that help oncologists choose which therapy is likely to work for a given patient, rather than developing therapies itself. Led by CEO Hitesh Goswami, with COO Kshitij Rishi and Chief Data Officer Puneet Pantane, the Bengaluru company has raised roughly ₹128 crore total, including a ₹38 crore round led by Infosys and growX Ventures, and was selected for Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Innovation Hub Challenge cohort in the U.S. Its flagship products are TARGT Absolute, a genomic profiling test spanning roughly 20,000 genes, and OncoTwin, an AI platform that builds a digital “twin” of a patient from genomic, pathology, radiology, and clinical data to guide treatment choice. The company has built in-hospital labs with AIIMS Jammu, Max Healthcare, and Shankara Hospital, aimed at cutting the turnaround time that otherwise forces many clinics to ship samples to metro labs, and runs OncoBuddy, a patient support platform. Trade coverage has highlighted its stated goal of correcting a structural bias in global cancer genomics, most reference datasets skew Caucasian, by building profiles tailored to South Asian, Latin American, and Southeast Asian patients. A partnership with the Maharashtra government is expected to establish a public-sector precision-oncology centre using its technology.
8. How it connects
A few patterns cut across these organizations. Most trace back to a small number of institutions (IIT Bombay, IISc Bangalore, Biocon’s founder network), which says something about how concentrated India’s advanced-biotech talent pipeline still is. Several were founded by clinician-scientists rather than pure business operators: both Purwar and Kharya kept treating patients while building their companies, which appears to have shaped their cost priorities from the start.
The paths diverge in structure, though. ImmunoACT and Immuneel both sell finished CAR-T therapies but arrived differently, one an academic spin-off, the other a purpose-built commercial venture. Cellogen straddles categories, working on both immunotherapy and gene editing at once. CSIR-IGIB and the Serum Institute represent a public-sector model closer to how India historically built its vaccine industry: discovery in a government lab, scale-up through an industrial partner. MedGenome, Strand, and 4baseCare sit outside the therapy business entirely, supplying the diagnostic and computational layer the others depend on.
9. Challenges
The ecosystem’s momentum comes with recognizable limits. GMP-grade manufacturing capacity is still concentrated in a handful of metro-adjacent facilities. Regulatory pathways, while more defined than a few years ago, are new enough that companies describe navigating them as a genuine undertaking. Financing remains thin, total funding across India’s leading cell and gene therapy companies is still small relative to what large multi-site trials require. Some policy analysts have also pointed to friction in adjacent fields, such as delayed approvals for genetically modified crops, as a possible source of investor caution about the broader regulatory environment, though how much that spills over into cell and gene therapy specifically is debatable.
10. Rewiring Costs of a Cure
Three years is not long in biotechnology. Yet in that span, India moved from no domestically approved cell or gene therapy to several, developed not in Boston or Basel but in a converted industrial unit in Navi Mumbai, a hospital wing in Bengaluru, and a CSIR lab in Delhi. What connects Rahul Purwar, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Gaurav Kharya, and the CSIR-IGIB team isn’t a shared technology so much as a shared premise: that a cure’s price tag is a decision, not a fact of nature.
A professor, a lab, a decade of persistence. Purwar was an Associate Professor at IIT Bombay when the research behind NexCAR19 began in 2013. It took five more years to become a company, and five after that for the therapy to reach a patient, a timeline that’s fairly normal in cell therapy, if easy to forget once the headlines only capture the ending. What made NexCAR19 notable wasn’t that it worked; CAR-T had already proven itself abroad. It was that it worked at roughly a tenth of the price, built on an in-house lentiviral vector platform rather than imported capability, the line item that drives much of CAR-T’s global cost.
The Biocon playbook, applied to cancer. Mazumdar-Shaw had already spent decades showing Indian manufacturing could make biologics affordable through Biocon before turning to CAR-T. Immuneel took a different route than ImmunoACT: license internationally validated science, then localize the manufacturing. The result, Qartemi, reached the market faster than a from-scratch approach likely would have, and the 2026 fundraise suggests investors increasingly see licensing as a durable model in its own right, not just a stopgap.
The doctor who kept treating patients. Kharya runs a bone marrow transplant unit in Delhi, treating children whose families can’t afford imported CAR-T. Cellogen grew out of that frustration, betting on a more technically ambitious bispecific design aimed at the relapse problem, while also building what looks increasingly like a platform business (the therapy itself, licensable QC kits, and AI monitoring tools) before a single patient has been dosed.
A public lab, a vaccine giant. BIRSA 101 only reached a path to patients once CSIR-IGIB handed it to the Serum Institute, the organization that has spent decades making vaccines by the billions of doses. CSIR-IGIB can do the discovery science; only an organization with Serum Institute’s manufacturing scale can turn that into a treatment reaching patients in Chhattisgarh and Odisha at a fraction of the price charged abroad. The name, honouring Birsa Munda on his 150th birth anniversary, was not an afterthought, given how heavily the disease falls on tribal communities.
The layer underneath. None of these therapies would know which patient to treat without a parallel ecosystem that never touches a syringe. MedGenome runs South Asia’s largest CAP-accredited testing lab; Strand builds the software that turns raw sequencing data into something a doctor can act on; 4baseCare is trying to go a step further, building an AI “digital twin” so oncologists can predict which therapy is likely to work before a patient starts it. All three share a complaint about global genomics: reference datasets skew Caucasian, so a variant flagged as dangerous in a U.S. database may behave differently in an Indian patient.
Taken together, these aren’t just seven separate stories: an academic spin-off, a licensing play, a doctor’s side project, a public-private handoff, and three companies that never touch a therapy. They read as something closer to an industrial strategy, even if it wasn’t planned that way.
