SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Exthymic Corporation (Exthymic) today announced that the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has awarded Exthymic a contract to develop a cell therapy device to address key issues underlying patient access and affordability.
The ARPA-H Scalable Cell Therapies through Optimized Phenotyping and Enrichment (SCOPE) project will provide Exthymic with up to $25 million of funding over two years to develop and test LITTLESTAR, a next generation device that enables the safe, reliable production of engineered cell therapies like CAR-T cell therapy by managing patient variability during the production process.
Using a patient's own cells is what makes cell therapies powerful. It's also what makes them so hard to produce," says Rich Stoner, Exthymic CEO. "The industry has spent a decade optimizing production, but it still can't tell you what makes one patient's cells work and another's fail. So it settles for a process it can get approved, and then decides which patients that process will accept. We won't solve access or scale commercially that way. Simply put, we're failing patients."
The LITTLESTAR device functions by directly measuring and reacting to differences in cell phenotype over a full production process. This adaptive control ensures each final dose is produced safely and reliably without the overhead of a dedicated clean room or quality control laboratory, enabling production of these curative therapies in community hospitals and other acute care settings.
"SCOPE reflects exactly the kind of high-risk, high-reward biomedical and health research investments ARPA-H was created to make," says John Schiel, ARPA-H Program Manager. "If successful, it will greatly improve access to these therapies and where patients can receive them."
As part of the SCOPE project, Exthymic is working with academic partners at the University of California, San Francisco and the Gates Institute at the University of Colorado Anschutz. Exthymic plans to develop multiple therapeutic assets on top of the LITTLESTAR instrument, including CAR-T, with clinical trials planned for early 2028.
“Exthymic appreciates ARPA-H’s support and their ongoing mission to bring curative therapies to patients across the United States. Cancer remains a national concern, and frequently the patients that need access to curative treatments like CAR-T are the farthest away from it,” says Stoner. “For the first time in a decade we have a path forward that brings cures to patients that have no hope of getting them with the current ex vivo or in vivo approaches.”
Exthymic will publish the case for this future at Exthymic.com, and preview the core technology at the Meeting on the Mesa in October 2026.
About Exthymic
Exthymic Corporation is developing a family of cell therapy devices and therapeutic assets to reduce the cost of and increase the access to curative engineered cell therapies like CAR-T cell therapy for patients across the United States. Located in San Diego, California, the company was founded by Rich Stoner, Dan Knudsen, and Kevin Cooksy in 2023. The company is backed by major private investors including Dimension Capital and Khosla Ventures.
Contacts
Media Contact: media@exthymic.com
