Cellectis

Cellectis is a French biopharmaceutical company. It develops genome-edited chimeric antigen receptor T-cell technologies for cancer immunotherapy. It has offices in Paris, New York City, and Raleigh, North Carolina. History Cellectis was founded by André Choulika in 1999. It built up a successful business based on the use of Meganuclease in genome engineering. Cellectis became a publicly traded company in 2007, and raised €21.2 million in a stock offering on Euronext. In 2010, it acquired Cyto Pulse, which had developed a new electroporation technology, and in 2011 it paid €28 million for Cellartis, a Swedish biotechnology company. In January 2011 the company licensed TALEN gene-editing technology from Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota. The company employed nearly 300 people in early 2014. With the advent of the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat) genome editing technique, the Cellectis meganuclease technology became uneconomic, and by 2013 the company was close to bankruptcy. It restructured, closed laboratories and reduced staff, and shifted research emphasis toward CAR-T technologies for cancer immunotherapy. Early in 2014 it reached a substantial financing deal with Servier, and later in the same year made a much larger agreement with Pfizer and Allogene. In March 2015 the company raised $228 million through a stock offering on NASDAQ. The shares fell by 15% in the first week of trading.