Is the Cell Therapy Market growing now?
In our cell therapy market deck, you will find everything you need to understand the market
SUMMARY
Yes. The Cell Therapy Market is growing now, with the strongest comparable commercial basket up about 26% year over year.
The growth is much more concentrated than the headline suggests. Carvykti and Breyanzi together produced slightly more than 100% of the net increase in the six-product basket because their gains also had to offset declines in Yescarta and Tecartus.
That makes this a market where company performance and market performance can diverge sharply. Gilead can report falling cell-therapy sales while the wider commercial category still expands at a strong double-digit rate.
Patient access is widening alongside revenue. Carvykti, Amtagvi and Aucatzyl are all expanding their treatment-center footprints, which makes the current growth look more like real adoption than a simple pricing effect.
Blood cancer still generates most visible cell-therapy revenue, but the development market has already moved well beyond it. Solid tumors now have recurring TIL revenue and an approved CAR-T in China, while autoimmune disease has reached Phase III.
In vivo CAR-T has become the industry's clearest strategic bet. Six major acquisitions add up to roughly $14.35 billion in headline value, showing that large drugmakers are willing to pay heavily to remove the personalized-manufacturing bottleneck.
The pipeline is also maturing rather than merely getting bigger. In the broader genetically modified therapy dataset used as a proxy for clinical maturity, Phase III programs rose more than 30% while preclinical programs declined.
Venture funding is still the weak link. Pure cell-therapy startup financing has not returned to earlier highs, even as broader gene, cell and RNA financing improves and capital concentrates around in vivo engineering, autoimmune disease and scalable manufacturing.
Commercial success is not eliminating restructuring. Adaptimmune sold approved assets, while Autolus and Iovance cut costs even as their products grew, a reminder that cell therapy can be a growing market with very difficult standalone economics.
Manufacturing is finally showing operating leverage. Carvykti capacity has expanded toward 10,000 patients per year, Iovance reports improving margins at higher volume, and Autolus has moved from negative manufacturing margins in 2025 to a 55% gross margin in its latest quarter.
The market is therefore stronger than the funding headlines suggest, but still fragile in one important way: most current commercial growth comes from a small number of products. The next phase depends on whether solid tumors, autoimmune disease, allogeneic therapy and in vivo CAR-T can turn that concentrated growth into a much broader market.
Why does the cell therapy market look strong and weak at the same time?
The cell therapy market is growing today, but the growth is concentrated enough that someone following the weaker CAR-T franchises could easily reach the opposite conclusion.
The split is visible in actual sales. Carvykti, Breyanzi, Amtagvi and Aucatzyl are growing quickly, while Gilead's Yescarta and Tecartus are shrinking under competitive pressure. Gilead's total cell-therapy sales fell 14% in its latest quarter even as several competing products posted growth above 40%. Both pictures are real.
Capital tells a similar story. Pure cell-therapy startup funding fell sharply through 2025, and developers such as Adaptimmune had to sell assets or restructure. At the same time, Lilly, AbbVie, Bristol Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca and Gilead have spent billions buying next-generation cell-therapy platforms, especially in vivo CAR-T.
So we need to separate market growth from company growth. The useful test is whether patients are receiving more therapies, commercial sales are rising, more serious programs are reaching late-stage trials, and large drugmakers are committing money to the next generation. On those measures, cell therapy currently looks stronger than the struggling-company headlines suggest.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest cell therapy market report.
Are cell therapy sales actually growing right now?
Yes, the commercially visible cell therapy market is growing fast right now: six major therapies with clean year-over-year product disclosures increased from about $1.34 billion to $1.69 billion in their latest reported quarter, a 26% jump.
We built that comparison ourselves from the latest company results rather than relying on a consultant's market-size forecast. The basket uses exactly the same six therapies in both periods: Carvykti, Breyanzi, Yescarta, Tecartus, Amtagvi and Aucatzyl. We left Abecma out because Bristol Myers Squibb no longer reports a comparable standalone quarterly figure for the product.
Johnson & Johnson reported Carvykti sales of $657 million, up from $439 million a year earlier. Bristol Myers Squibb's Breyanzi reached $484 million from $344 million. Iovance's Amtagvi rose from about $54 million to $91 million, while Autolus more than doubled Aucatzyl from $20.9 million to $45.7 million.
Those gains were large enough to absorb substantial declines elsewhere. Yescarta fell from $393 million to $346 million and Tecartus from $92 million to $70 million. So we have a market where some major products are clearly losing ground while aggregate disclosed sales still rise by roughly one quarter.
| Cell therapy | Latest quarterly sales | Year earlier | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carvykti | $657M | $439M | +50% |
| Breyanzi | $484M | $344M | +41% |
| Yescarta | $346M | $393M | -12% |
| Amtagvi | $90.7M | $54.1M | +68% |
| Tecartus | $70M | $92M | -24% |
| Aucatzyl | $45.7M | $20.9M | +119% |
| Comparable basket | $1.69B | $1.34B | +26% |
This market map, featured in our cell therapy market deck, highlights top companies and startups in the cell therapy market
Is CAR-T growth broad, or are Carvykti and Breyanzi carrying the market?
Carvykti and Breyanzi are carrying most of the current CAR-T growth, and together they generated slightly more than 100% of the net increase in our six-product cell-therapy basket.
Carvykti added about $218 million of quarterly revenue compared with a year earlier. Breyanzi added another $140 million. Together, that is roughly $358 million of extra sales, while the whole six-product basket added about $350 million.
The arithmetic looks strange until we account for the products moving backward. Yescarta and Tecartus together lost roughly $69 million. Amtagvi and Aucatzyl then contributed another $61 million of growth. Carvykti and Breyanzi therefore produced about 102% of the basket's net increase because their gains also had to cover declines elsewhere.
That concentration changes our reading of the market. Current CAR-T growth is being won product by product rather than lifting every approved therapy. Gilead explicitly blamed competitive pressure for its 14% decline in cell-therapy revenue. Meanwhile Carvykti is expanding earlier in multiple myeloma and internationally, while Breyanzi has accumulated approvals across several B-cell malignancies.
A company can consequently be in a growing cell-therapy market and still have a shrinking franchise. Right now, product quality, label breadth, manufacturing capacity and treatment-center access appear to matter far more than simply having an approved CAR-T.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest cell therapy market report.
Are more patients actually getting cell therapies today?
Yes, more patients are getting cell therapies today, and treatment is spreading beyond the small group of specialist academic hospitals that defined early commercial CAR-T.
Legend Biotech said Carvykti had passed 10,000 treated clinical and commercial patients by the end of 2025. Since then, availability has expanded to 348 sites across 19 markets, up from 294 sites at year-end. The international part of the franchise is moving particularly fast: Johnson & Johnson's latest results showed international Carvykti sales more than doubling year over year.
Amtagvi is widening access in a different part of cell therapy. Iovance currently has more than 95 authorized treatment centers in North America and expects at least 110 by year-end. Roughly one-third of that network is already in community settings. The company says commercial infusions are now running at around 50 patients per month.
Aucatzyl is moving in the same direction. Autolus had passed 80 authorized treatment centers by midyear, ahead of its original rollout plan, and said its latest growth came from greater use at existing centers as well as new centers beginning to treat patients.
We still cannot build a clean global patient-volume series because manufacturers disclose patient numbers very differently. But sales, treatment-center counts and manufacturing volumes are moving together at several independent companies. That is much stronger evidence of real patient growth than revenue alone would be.
As this chart shows, and as featured in our cell therapy market deck, search interest in stem cell therapy has been rising steadily
Is cell therapy still mostly a blood-cancer market?
Cell therapy revenue is still dominated by blood cancers today, while the development market has already moved much further into neurological, autoimmune, regenerative and other diseases.
The commercial side remains easy to recognize. Carvykti treats multiple myeloma. Breyanzi, Yescarta, Tecartus and Aucatzyl target leukemias or lymphomas. Those products account for the large majority of the directly observable sales in our basket.
The pipeline looks much broader. ASGCT and Citeline currently track around 940 non-genetically modified cell therapies in development, with roughly 61% targeting non-oncology diseases. Their latest landscape data show substantial programs in rare disease, neurology, musculoskeletal conditions, metabolic disease, cardiovascular disease and immunology alongside cancer.
Actual approvals are starting to reflect that diversity. Japan has recently authorized cell therapies for epidermolysis bullosa and meniscal injury. An iPS-derived dopaminergic progenitor-cell therapy for Parkinson's disease also received conditional and time-limited approval there. These products have very little in common commercially with a personalized CAR-T for lymphoma.
The gap between today's revenue and tomorrow's pipeline is therefore large. Blood cancer still pays most of the bills, but it no longer describes the full cell-therapy industry.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest cell therapy market report.
Is solid-tumor cell therapy finally becoming a real business?
Yes, solid-tumor cell therapy is a real business now, although its commercial base remains small beside blood-cancer CAR-T.
Amtagvi gives us the clearest evidence. Iovance generated about $91 million from the melanoma therapy in its latest quarter, roughly 68% more than a year earlier. A therapy based on harvesting and expanding tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes is therefore producing revenue at an annualized run rate above $350 million before considering future indications.
The next question is whether TIL therapy can travel beyond melanoma. Iovance's pivotal non-small-cell lung-cancer cohorts are approaching completion, and the company has also moved into soft-tissue sarcoma and endometrial cancer. Management estimates the eligible U.S. lung-cancer opportunity could be roughly seven times larger than the current advanced-melanoma opportunity. That estimate still has to survive clinical results, regulatory review and real-world adoption, but the upside is easy to see.
CAR-T has also crossed an important solid-tumor line. China approved CARsgen's satri-cel for CLDN18.2-positive advanced gastric or gastroesophageal-junction cancer, widely described as the first CAR-T approved specifically for a solid tumor.
We can now point to recurring TIL revenue, an approved solid-tumor CAR-T and several registrational expansion programs. Solid tumors have moved beyond years of interesting laboratory results into the early stages of a commercial cell-therapy market.
This chart, featured in our cell therapy market deck, shows annual VC investment in cell therapy startups
Could autoimmune disease become the next big cell therapy market?
Autoimmune disease is currently the strongest candidate to become cell therapy's next large market outside cancer, although meaningful commercial revenue has yet to arrive.
Cartesian Therapeutics is already running a Phase III trial of Descartes-08 in roughly 100 patients with myasthenia gravis. The treatment is given through six weekly outpatient infusions without the preconditioning chemotherapy normally associated with conventional CAR-T. Earlier peer-reviewed data showed durable improvements in myasthenia-gravis symptoms, which was enough to justify moving directly into a registrational study.
Other companies are attacking autoimmune disease with different versions of cell therapy. Autolus is testing obe-cel in lupus nephritis and progressive multiple sclerosis. Allogene has begun enrolling patients with autoimmune disease into a study of its allogeneic ALLO-329 program. Several in vivo developers are trying to generate CAR-T cells directly inside patients for B-cell-driven autoimmune conditions.
That technological variety is important. Autoimmune cell therapy no longer depends on one small academic experiment or one manufacturing method. Autologous, allogeneic, RNA-based and in vivo approaches are now being tested around the same basic idea: deeply depleting pathological immune-cell populations and allowing the immune system to rebuild.
The next proof point is clinical rather than financial. If a late-stage program can reproduce the dramatic remissions seen in early autoimmune CAR-T studies without making patients endure oncology-style conditioning and hospital logistics, the addressable population becomes vastly larger than the rare cancers that launched the industry.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest cell therapy market report.
Why is Big Pharma suddenly spending billions on in vivo CAR-T?
Big Pharma is spending heavily on in vivo CAR-T because personalized manufacturing still limits how many patients cell therapy can reach, and six major acquisitions now add up to roughly $14.35 billion in headline value.
Traditional CAR-T requires cells to be removed from each patient, shipped to a manufacturing facility, genetically modified, tested and returned for infusion. In vivo CAR-T tries to do the engineering inside the patient's body. A successful version could turn a bespoke manufacturing process into something much closer to administering a conventional drug.
The buying spree is unusually concentrated. Lilly acquired Orna and Kelonia. AbbVie bought Capstan. Bristol Myers Squibb bought Orbital. AstraZeneca bought EsoBiotec. Gilead's Kite acquired Interius. Five large drugmakers have independently paid for variations of essentially the same idea within a short period.
The science is also moving beyond acquisition decks. ASGCT and Citeline counted 11 new mRNA-encoded CAR-T programs entering development in their latest quarter, equal to the number added during the whole of 2025. Legend Biotech has meanwhile reported the first clinical proof of concept from its LB2501 in vivo CAR-T program: at the higher tested dose, all patients responded and 83.3% achieved complete responses. The cohort is still very small, so we would not extrapolate those percentages to a future commercial product, but human activity is now visible.
Around $14 billion of headline acquisition value does not prove that in vivo CAR-T will work at scale. It does show where several of the industry's best-funded buyers think the biggest bottleneck can be removed.
| In vivo cell-therapy company | Buyer | Headline transaction value | Main approach |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kelonia Therapeutics | Eli Lilly | Up to $7.0B | Lentiviral in vivo CAR-T |
| Orna Therapeutics | Eli Lilly | Up to $2.4B | Circular RNA and LNP |
| Capstan Therapeutics | AbbVie | $2.1B | Targeted mRNA and LNP |
| Orbital Therapeutics | Bristol Myers Squibb | $1.5B | RNA-based in vivo reprogramming |
| EsoBiotec | AstraZeneca | Up to $1.0B | Targeted lentiviral delivery |
| Interius BioTherapeutics | Gilead/Kite | $350M | In vivo CAR engineering |
| Combined headline value | ~$14.35B |
This chart, featured in our cell therapy market deck, shows how Legend Biotech is winning in cell therapy
Is the cell therapy pipeline actually getting stronger?
The clinical pipeline around genetically modified cell therapies looks stronger today, with later-stage programs rising much faster than the total program count.
We have to be precise with the dataset here. ASGCT and Citeline place genetically modified cell therapies such as CAR-T inside their broader “gene therapy” pipeline, so the numbers below also contain gene therapies that are not cell therapies. We use the series to measure clinical maturity around the category, rather than pretending every program in the table is a cell therapy.
Over the latest comparable year, the preclinical count fell from 1,461 to 1,332, roughly 9%. Phase I programs increased from 361 to 427, Phase II from 330 to 387 and Phase III from 45 to 59. The overall pipeline expanded only about 3%, yet the Phase III population grew by more than 30%.
That pattern is more useful than a surge of new preclinical companies. A sector becomes commercially more credible when a larger share of its surviving programs moves through human trials. Two cell-therapy programs were among the recent entrants into Phase III, including Kite's KITE-753 and TAEST-16001 for soft-tissue sarcoma.
The separate non-genetically modified cell-therapy pipeline remains large as well, at roughly 940 therapies in development. Taken together, the data show pruning near the bottom of the funnel alongside continued movement toward clinical validation.
| Development stage | Earlier count | Current count | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Preclinical | 1,461 | 1,332 | -8.8% |
| Phase I | 361 | 427 | +18.3% |
| Phase II | 330 | 387 | +17.3% |
| Phase III | 45 | 59 | +31.1% |
| Pre-registration | 13 | 12 | -7.7% |
| Total | 2,155 | 2,217 | +2.9% |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest cell therapy market report.
Is cell therapy funding recovering now?
Pure cell-therapy funding has not fully recovered yet, even though the broader gene, cell and RNA financing market is clearly improving now.
This is one place where we should resist an easy bullish conclusion. J.P. Morgan's DealForma data showed disclosed cell-therapy seed and Series A financing falling sharply through 2025. In the first half alone, cell therapy attracted only $99 million of seed and Series A funding compared with roughly $470 million during all of 2024. DealForma also recorded only $147 million of cell-therapy venture funding across three rounds in the second quarter of that year.
The latest industry-wide numbers are much stronger, but they cover gene, cell and RNA companies together. ASGCT and Citeline counted 20 seed or Series A financings totaling $500.4 million in their latest quarter. Funding value rose 29% from the previous quarter, round volume increased 54%, and the $500 million total was more than two and a half times the amount raised in the same quarter a year earlier.
More specific cell and gene therapy deal data also show capital concentrating around particular technologies. An ISCT review of recent financings counted roughly $282 million going specifically into CAR-T companies in one quarter, while RNA-focused companies attracted even more.
So funding conditions are getting better, but the recovery is selective. Investors are paying for in vivo engineering, autoimmune applications, scalable manufacturing and strong clinical differentiation. A generic cell-therapy pitch no longer attracts money simply because the modality is exciting.
This chart, featured in our cell therapy market deck, shows annual funding in cell therapy startups
If cell therapy is growing, why are companies still cutting jobs and selling assets?
Cell therapy companies are still cutting jobs because commercial growth today is rewarding a few products while the cost of building and selling a cell therapy remains brutal for smaller developers.
Adaptimmune shows how unforgiving the economics can be. The company obtained the first U.S. approval for an engineered TCR T-cell therapy in a solid tumor with Tecelra, yet it later sold Tecelra and three related programs to US WorldMeds for $55 million upfront plus as much as $30 million in future payments. A landmark approval did not give Adaptimmune enough scale to make the commercial infrastructure attractive as a standalone business.
Autolus presents the more encouraging version of the same pressure. The company announced a roughly 13% workforce reduction and about $15 million of expected annual operating-expense savings while simultaneously increasing manufacturing volume. A few months later, Aucatzyl sales were up 119% year over year and full-year guidance had been raised. Cost cutting and market growth are happening inside the same company.
Iovance's commercial business is growing too, despite a previous restructuring that reduced its workforce by around 19% and targeted more than $100 million of annual savings. Its latest quarter then produced record revenue and a 56% gross margin.
The pattern increasingly looks like consolidation around viable assets. Cell therapy requires expensive manufacturing, specialized treatment centers, reimbursement work, clinical support and long commercialization timelines. Companies with strong products can grow while becoming leaner, and weaker developers can disappear while the total market continues to expand.
Can cell therapy manufacturing finally scale?
Cell therapy manufacturing is scaling much better than it did a few years ago, but personalized production still keeps the business far from drug-like simplicity.
Carvykti shows how far conventional autologous CAR-T has moved. Legend Biotech completed an expansion of its Raritan facility with installed capacity for up to 10,000 patients per year. That single annual capacity figure is roughly equal to the number of clinical and commercial Carvykti patients treated cumulatively before 2026. The company is now supporting hundreds of treatment sites across 19 markets.
Iovance has built a centralized TIL facility with capacity above 5,000 patients annually and says current commercial turnaround is about 31 days or less. Higher volumes and manufacturing efficiencies helped push gross margin to 56% in the latest quarter, up from 41% one quarter earlier.
Autolus is growing Aucatzyl while cutting costs. Its manufacturing economics have changed especially quickly: gross margin reached 55% in the latest quarter after just 6% in the previous quarter and negative margins throughout 2025. Autolus said lower manufacturing cost per batch, higher volume and fewer inventory write-offs drove the improvement.
Off-the-shelf cell therapy could push scalability further. Allogene's ongoing pivotal cema-cel study reported minimal-residual-disease clearance in 7 of 12 treated patients versus 2 of 12 patients under observation in an early interim analysis. Roughly one-third of screening and infusions occurred at community cancer centers, and no treatment-related hospitalization was reported in that small dataset. The sample remains too small to settle the efficacy question, but the operating model is much closer to how a broadly distributed medicine would need to work.
We can already see operating leverage in today's personalized therapies. In vivo and allogeneic approaches are now trying to remove another layer of complexity rather than simply make the existing factories a little faster.
This chart, featured in our cell therapy market deck, compares the main business model options for cell therapy biotech companies
So, is the Cell Therapy Market growing now?
Yes, the cell therapy market is growing now, and the strongest directly observable commercial basket we can build is up about 26% year over year.
That is a real increase in marketed-product revenue, supported by wider treatment networks and improving manufacturing economics. Solid-tumor cell therapy now generates meaningful recurring sales. Autoimmune disease has reached Phase III. Later-stage development activity is growing faster than the overall pipeline. Big Pharma has attached roughly $14 billion of headline acquisition value to one attempt to make cell therapy radically easier to deliver: in vivo CAR-T.
The weaknesses are equally clear. Pure cell-therapy financing has not returned to its earlier highs. Several approved products are shrinking. Companies are still laying off employees and selling assets. Current commercial growth is highly concentrated.
Carvykti and Breyanzi together account for slightly more than all the net growth in our comparable six-product basket because they are also compensating for declines in older CAR-T franchises. That makes a 26% aggregate growth rate more fragile than it first appears.
We would still answer the title clearly: the cell therapy market is growing today. The evidence is stronger than it was during the previous hype cycle because growth now comes from actual product sales, actual patients and better manufacturing, while the pipeline is pushing into solid tumors, autoimmune disease and simpler delivery models. The next stage depends on whether those newer approaches can turn today's concentrated growth into something much broader.
OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis tests whether the Cell Therapy Market is growing now by looking at the parts of the market that can be observed directly: commercial product sales, patient access, clinical development, financing, strategic investment and manufacturing scale.
We give more weight to reported product revenue than to consultant market-size forecasts. The main commercial comparison uses the same six therapies in both periods — Carvykti, Breyanzi, Yescarta, Tecartus, Amtagvi and Aucatzyl — so the year-over-year growth rate is based on a like-for-like basket. Abecma is excluded because Bristol Myers Squibb no longer reports a comparable standalone quarterly figure.
Patient growth is assessed through manufacturer disclosures on treated patients, authorized treatment centers, commercial infusion activity and international expansion. We do not treat any one company's patient count as a complete global series; instead, we look for the same direction across several independent products and treatment networks.
For clinical development, we separate genetically modified therapies from non-genetically modified cell therapies where the available datasets allow it. ASGCT and Citeline place CAR-T and other genetically modified cell therapies inside a broader gene-therapy pipeline, so those stage counts are used as a measure of clinical maturity around the category rather than as a pure cell-therapy total.
Financing is also split into different types of capital. Pure cell-therapy startup funding is assessed separately from broader gene, cell and RNA financing, while large pharmaceutical acquisitions are treated as strategic investment rather than venture-market recovery.
The in vivo CAR-T transaction total is based on the announced headline values for Kelonia Therapeutics, Orna Therapeutics, Capstan Therapeutics, Orbital Therapeutics, EsoBiotec and Interius BioTherapeutics. Because several of those deals include contingent payments, the combined figure is best read as headline transaction value rather than cash paid upfront.
Manufacturing scale is assessed through installed patient capacity, turnaround time, treatment-site reach and reported gross-margin improvement. These measures help show whether commercial cell therapy is becoming easier to deliver and whether higher volumes are beginning to improve economics.
Key sources used for this analysis include Legend Biotech's earnings releases, Bristol Myers Squibb's Q2 2026 product-revenue filing, Gilead's Q2 2026 results, Iovance's Q2 2026 results, Autolus's Q2 2026 results, ASGCT and Citeline's gene, cell and RNA therapy landscape reports, Cartesian Therapeutics on the Phase III AURORA program, Allogene Therapeutics on ALLO-329, Eli Lilly on Kelonia, Eli Lilly on Orna, AbbVie on Capstan, Bristol Myers Squibb on Orbital, AstraZeneca on EsoBiotec, Gilead/Kite on Interius, and Adaptimmune on the Tecelra asset sale.
This chart, featured in our cell therapy market deck, shows how market revenue is split across customer segments in the cell therapy market
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