Out of jobs, a pair of ear­ly cell ther­a­py ex­ec­u­tives went to Seoul, came back with a new com­pa­ny, $70M and a plan to leapfrog nat­ur­al killer com­peti­tors

Tom Far­rell didn’t have much to do af­ter Bel­licum an­nounced in Jan­u­ary 2017 that they were bring­ing in a new CEO. He had led the CAR-T com­pa­ny for over a decade, since be­fore Carl June’s New Eng­land Jour­nal of Med­i­cine pa­per had made cell ther­a­py the hottest thing in can­cer re­search. Now he was fac­ing an 18-month non-com­pete.

So he worked quick­ly when, not long af­ter that clock ex­pired in 2018, a banker who helped take Bel­licum pub­lic told him about a South Ko­re­an com­pa­ny called Green Cross Lab­Cell that had built a nat­ur­al killer cell fac­to­ry and was look­ing to de­vel­op ther­a­pies off it. Far­rell hopped a plane to Seoul.

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