Ex­clu­sive: GSK’s Hal Bar­ron al­lies with Rick Klaus­ner’s $600M cell ther­a­py start­up, look­ing to break new ground blitz­ing sol­id tu­mors

LON­DON — Chances are, you’ve heard lit­tle or noth­ing about Rick Klaus­ner’s start­up Lyell. But that ends now.

Klaus­ner, the for­mer head of the Na­tion­al Can­cer In­sti­tute, for­mer ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor for glob­al health at the Gates Foun­da­tion, co-founder at Juno and one of the lead­ers in the boom­ing cell ther­a­py field, has brought to­geth­er one of the most promi­nent teams of sci­en­tists tack­ling cell ther­a­py 2.0 — high­light­ed by a quest to bridge a daunt­ing tech gap that sep­a­rates some pro­found ad­vances in blood can­cers with sol­id tu­mors. And to­day he’s of­fi­cial­ly adding Hal Bar­ron and Glax­o­SmithK­line as a ma­jor league col­lab­o­ra­tor which is pitch­ing in a large por­tion of the $600 mil­lion he’s raised in the past year to make that vi­sion a re­al­i­ty.

“We’ve be­ing stay­ing stealth,” Klaus­ner tells me, then adding with a chuck­le: “and go­ing back to stealth af­ter this.”

“Cell ther­a­py has a lot of chal­lenges,” notes Bar­ron, the R&D chief at GSK, tick­ing off the re­sis­tance put up by sol­id tu­mors to cell ther­a­pies, the vein-to-vein time in­volved in tak­ing im­mune cells out of pa­tients, en­gi­neer­ing them to at­tack can­cer cells, and get­ting them back in, and more. “Over the years Rick and I talked about how it would be won­der­ful to take that on as a mis­sion.”

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