Astellas is preparing to close its Seattle site for its stem cell therapy unit, with around 55 employees set to be affected.
The Japanese pharma acquired the site when it bought Seattle-based Universal Cells in a $102.5 million deal in 2018. The prize for Astellas was to secure the biotech’s Universal Donor Cell tech, which is used to create cell therapy products that do not require human leukocyte antigen matching, which in principle can avoid patients’ bodies rejecting donor stem cells.
Universal had made the case that its technology—unlike nuclease-based genome editing—does not require a DNA strand break, does not produce off-target alterations to the genome, avoids unwanted mutations at the target site and does not introduce foreign nuclease genes…