Stylus Medicine, a member of BioSpace’s NextGen Class of 2026, launched in May 2025 to develop new, less complex genetic medicines. The company’s in vivo approach has attracted “intense” interest from Big Pharma.
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There’s a simple answer to why Stylus Medicine is willing to enter the cell therapy fray at a time when the pharma industry is sending mixed signals: “Patients can’t wait,” said CEO Emile Nuwaysir. “It doesn’t matter what the market says, the patients are still waiting.”
Over the last year, Takeda and Novo Nordisk offloaded their cell therapy assets, casting a shadow on the future of the modality. But in recent months, the picture has brightened. Bristol Myers Squibb bought Orbital Therapeutics for $1.5 billion in October 2025 to bolster its cell therapy work. And in late February, Gilead bought out CAR T partner Arcellx for $7.8 billion.
Stylus, a member of BioSpace’s NextGen Class of 2026, launched in May 2025 to develop new, less complex genetic medicines. Cell therapy still has some fight left, and Stylus wants to be a key part of it, the biotech’s executive insisted.
“We see CAR T as perhaps the single biggest contribution our generation will make to medicine,” Nuwaysir said.
But the CEO acknowledges the market challenges that have stymied earlier entrants. “The ex vivo paradigm, probably finally, is running its course,” Nuwaysir said of earlier medicines with complex manufacturing processes that involve collecting and manipulating a patient’s cells.
“[On] January 1, 2025, the idea of in vivo CAR T was just an idea. It wasn’t proven. We were the evangelists, and the market hadn’t gotten there yet,” Nuwaysir said. But a series of deals in CAR T—Gilead’s being the most recent example—helped build momentum. The CEO said this shows that Big Pharmas think there’s big potential in the approach.
“We got sucked along with that, a little bit of tailwind,” Nuwaysir explained of Stylus’ beginnings. The biotech was able to snag some investors and launch in the spring of 2025.
With in vivo engineering, the medicine features a lipid nanoparticle with nucleic acid that is injected into the patient to create CAR T cells, which expand to tackle tumor cells. Stylus plans to use an enzyme called a recombinase that can specifically engineer T cells to create a more potent, durable and safer CAR T.
“It’s a fundamental shift in the challenges, the expense, the delays associated with ex vivo cell therapy,” said Chief Scientific Officer Jason Fontenot. The technology turns cell therapy “into something that’s much more like a vaccine.”
Older cell therapy companies are now trying to switch on the fly to an in vivo approach, which means Stylus is starting ahead, Nuwaysir said.
Stylus plans to focus on oncology initially, but Nuwaysir and Fontenot see broad application in immune and autoimmune conditions down the road. The biotech has not yet disclosed its lead program but expects to in the coming year.
Nuwaysir said that his team has been busy fielding outreach from pharma companies, which could yield future partnerships.
“In our experience being the little guy growing up in this is that there’s intense interest from pharma. They really want to stay close. They’re reaching out to us. In my 30 years, I’ve never really experienced this much positive pressure.”
