BioPharm
Autolus: engineering new cancer treatments
UCL spinout Autolus is playing a pivotal role in bringing revolutionary cancer treatments from the laboratory to the clinic, offering hope to cancer patients who previously had few or no treatment options.
Autolus’ focus is CAR-T therapies. This approach involves re-engineering a patients’ own T cells, rearming them to fight their cancer. By extracting a patient’s T-cells and inserting a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) with the unique chemical signature of the cancer, the immune cells are re-programmed to recognise and kill the cancer cells specific to that person. Clinical trials have shown that CAR-T cells can be highly effective in treating patients with leukaemias and lymphomas which have failed to respond to standard anti-cancer treatments, as well as holding promise in the treatment of solid tumours.
Autolus has refined this technology to develop a next-generation CAR-T therapy called Obecabtagene autoleucel (obe-cel) with the product name of AUCATZYL, which studies have shown to be more effective and with fewer side-effects when treating adults with an aggressive blood cancer.
Following extensive clinical trials, this personalised therapy has received regulatory approval from the MHRA and the FDA.
AUCATZYL went on to receive European Commission authorisation in July 2025 for treating adults with relapsed or refractory B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (r/r B-ALL). The pivotal FELIX trial showed a 76.6% complete response rate, with median event-free survival of 11.9 months.
Autolus’ precisely targeted, controlled and highly active T cell technology allows them to design tailored treatments that incorporate adaptations that give the cell specific abilities to target a particular indication, to survive for longer, or to combat features of the tumour micro-environment.
“The close relationship between Autolus and UCLB has spanned more than a decade since UCLB helped establish the company in 2014. I’m delighted about the approval of AUCATZYL in the UK which represents a huge milestone in Autolus’ success story. It also underscores the important role of long-term capital investment and other support in helping university spinouts bring advanced therapeutics from the research lab to the market where they can benefit patients.”
“I have no doubt that in 20 years’ time, highly engineered immune cells will be the mainstay of cancer therapy. The scope of engineering possible will allow development of highly selective non-toxic treatments.”