Just how con­fi­dent is Arie Bellde­grun about Kite's po­si­tion in the tur­bu­lent CAR-T race? He's glad you asked.

Ear­ly on in his ca­reer, Arie Bellde­grun did re­search un­der Steven Rosen­berg at the NCI. Now, look­ing back over the in­ter­ven­ing decades, he still mar­vels at the first ground­break­ing lab ex­per­i­ments that would even­tu­al­ly point to the late-stage CAR-T ther­a­pies at a hand­ful of com­pa­nies like Kite Phar­ma, where he’s the CEO now and Rosen­berg is the em­i­nent sci­en­tist in his cor­ner of the ring.

“We were so im­pressed that T cells were killing can­cer cells in vi­vo, in 1985,” Bellde­grun tells me. “That’s where it start­ed. Since then we’ve con­tin­ued to work.”

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