Vor Bio is the latest cell therapy company to reach the end of the road. The biotech is immediately winding down clinical and manufacturing operations and laying off almost all staff.
Around 95% of employees will be departing, with just eight employees remaining who will work to pursue strategic alternatives that could potentially include divesting or licensing assets, a sale of the company or a merger, according to a May 8 release.
The decision comes after Vor assessed data from its clinical programs alongside the current “challenging fundraising environment.” The wind-down isn’t driven by safety concerns with any assets, the company pointed out.
The biotech's shares closed Wednesday trading at 56 cents on Wednesday, having managed to cling on above the $1 line for the first two months of the year.
Vor's lead assets are both in phase 1/2 trials. A hematopoietic stem cell transplant therapy called trem-cel was in development in combination with Pfizer’s Mylotarg for certain patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), alongside an allogeneic CAR-T therapy also in development for AML.
Vor was founded by oncologist and author Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., to advance gene-edited stem cell therapies for blood cancers. The outfit joins a growing list of similar biotechs to shutter or struggle; of the 63 biotech layoff rounds tracked by Fierce Biotech in the first quarter of 2025, nearly a third came from cell and gene companies.
CAR-T company Cargo Therapeutics dumped all of its assets and laid off 90% of its workforce in March, while macrophage-focused Carisma Therapeutics followed suit in April, retaining a skeleton staff of six employees to lead the company to the biotech graveyard.