Less than a year after purchasing private cell therapy company ImmPact Bio to help refresh its ailing CAR-T pipeline, manufacturing considerations have prompted Lyell Immunopharma to cut staff at its new subsidiary and mothball a California facility picked up in the deal.
Lyell is laying off 73 employees at ImmPact’s West Hills manufacturing facility in Los Angeles beginning in June, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act alert filed with the state of California.
Along with the workforce reduction, Lyell plans to close the ImmPact production facility “over the coming months,” a Lyell spokesperson told Fierce Pharma on Monday.
“Following a successful technology transfer and clearance by the FDA of an Investigational New Drug Comparability Protocol, our LyFE manufacturing center in Bothell Washington is now manufacturing IMPT-314 to supply our ongoing Phase 1/2 clinical trial,” the spokesperson said.
The LyFE facility, which Lyell completed in March 2021, is equipped to supply the CAR-T candidate for ongoing and planned clinical trials and could also be used to support the med’s commercial launch, should it eventually win approval, she added.
The CD19/20-targeting CAR-T asset IMPT-314—which Lyell is testing across two different treatment lines of aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma—was the primary motivating factor behind Lyell’s acquisition of ImmPact. The deal was announced in late October and closed just a few days later on Halloween.
Lyell handed over $30 million in cash plus another $37.5 million in Lyell stock to get its hands on ImmPact's pipeline. The deal also includes clinical milestone and potential royalty payment terms.
In tandem with the buyout, Lyell said it was shaking up its pipeline to channel resources toward its most differentiated CAR-T programs, including ImmPact’s IMPT-314, and dropping development of its former chief asset—the ROR1-targeted CAR-T candidate LYL797—in favor of the next-gen ROR1 candidate LYL119.
The company also scrapped work on its tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte program LYL845.
Following a death and other adverse events, Lyell was forced to rethink its phase 1 study of LYL797 in solid tumor patients last summer. The difficulties prompted the company to adopt a two-track approach to its trial in non-small cell lung cancer and move at different speeds in different patient populations.
Lyell ultimately retired the candidate once ImmPact’s dual-targeting CAR-T entered the picture.
Currently, IMPT-314 is the only asset listed on Lyell’s virtual pipeline. The company has said it expects to kick off a pivotal trial for the candidate in third-line lymphoma patients who haven’t tried a CAR-T sometime in 2025.