SOMERVILLE, Mass — October 8, 2025 — Leads & Copy — Tessera Therapeutics has received up to $41.3 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to support the development of its in vivo CAR-T therapy. This therapy aims to retrain immune cells directly within the body to fight cancer and autoimmune diseases, utilizing Tessera’s Gene Writing and delivery platforms. The EMBODY program, led by ARPA-H Program Manager Daria Fedyukina, Ph.D., will leverage Tessera’s Gene Writing and proprietary lipid nanoparticle (LNP)-based delivery platforms to engineer functional CAR-T cells directly within the body.
Tessera is developing Gene Writers, designed to precisely and durably integrate therapeutic instructions into the genome, enabling the incorporation of CAR sequences into T cells using non-viral delivery. Through a single intravenous administration of Gene Writer formulated in a targeted LNP, Tessera aims to generate potent, disease-specific CAR-T cells directly in the body, eliminating the need for ex vivo cell manipulation, viral vectors, and toxic lymphodepletion.
Michael Holmes, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of Tessera Therapeutics, stated that the company is honored to receive this support from ARPA-H to develop the next generation of immunotherapies. He noted that this work builds on the progress made using their Gene Writing and delivery platforms to engineer T cells in vivo and has the potential to dramatically improve the accessibility, safety, and scalability of currently available CAR-T therapies.
Under the EMBODY program, Tessera will develop in vivo CAR-T therapies for therapeutic applications in oncology or autoimmune disease, leveraging targeted LNPs designed to enable T cell-specific delivery with high efficiency. Preclinical studies have demonstrated robust delivery to T cells and efficient CAR transgene integration, supporting the potential for single-dose, curative therapies. The award builds on Tessera’s continued momentum across its pipeline, including recent advances in in vivo genome engineering for liver, hematopoietic stem cell, and T cell-directed therapies.
Jonathan Pappas, PhD, LifeSci Communications, LLC, jpappas@lifescicomms.com
Source: Tessera Therapeutics
