Over the past year and a half, in vivo CAR-T has re-entered the capital market's spotlight, with several transactions reigniting commercial potential for this approach.
AbbVie announced in 2025 its acquisition of Capstan for up to $2.1 billion. AstraZeneca acquired EsoBiotec. Eli Lilly announced in April 2026 its acquisition of Kelonia for up to $7 billion.
Several multinational corporations have moved in succession, demonstrating that CAR-T therapy within the body has become a core focus for them in their race to secure the next-generation therapeutic platform; Eli Lilly's $7 billion investment has already validated the potential of this therapy.
Capital is focused on in vivo CAR-T, with the core issue still being the industrialization challenges that traditional CAR-T has not yet fully resolved.
Traditional CAR-T has demonstrated the upper limit of efficacy in cell therapy. Companies such as Fosun Kite, WuXi Jujian, Legend Biotech,驯鹿生物, HeYuan Bio, and Junshi Biosciences have propelled China’s CAR-T from concept to approval, manufacturing, hospital adoption, and reimbursement negotiations. However, the industry is increasingly aware that the real challenges have never been limited to approval alone.
The challenge is whether patients can afford to wait. The challenge is whether hospitals can scale to handle the demand. The challenge is how the payment system can absorb prices in the millions. The challenge is transforming the "one patient, one drug" production model into a sustainable business.
CAR-T therapy inside the body attracts investment because it attempts to rewrite all these steps at once: reducing the need to extract cells, modify them, expand them, perform quality control, and reinfuse them externally—by delivering genetic instructions directly into the patient’s body, enabling the patient’s own T cells to generate CAR-T cells internally.
If this pathway is validated by clinical data, the way cell therapies are produced and paid for could both change.
In this context, on April 29, Weitao Biology announced that it had recently completed its Series A and Series A+ funding rounds, with a total financing amount exceeding $50 million.
According to the company’s disclosed shareholder information, a prominent lineup of venture capital firms is involved, clearly indicating a strategic capital positioning in CAR-T therapy. Zhengxin Valley Capital and Decheng Capital led the round, with follow-on investments from OrbiMed, Han Kang Capital, Eisai Innovation Venture Fund, Jianfa Emerging Investment, as well as existing shareholders Qiming Venture Partners, Shunxi Fund, and Xingze Capital.
For an early-stage company spun off from Sandridge Bio and focused on in vivo CAR-T, this combination indicates that in vivo CAR-T has entered a more defined institutional pricing phase.
Why was Weitao split out?
Weitao comes from Shali Bio's in vivo CAR-T platform.
Public information shows that Weitao was founded on June 25, 2025, and is developing an in vivo CAR-T pipeline based on targeted LNP delivery systems, targeting hematological malignancies and autoimmune diseases. Its lead candidate, GT801, is an in vivo CAR-T therapy targeting CD19 using T-LNP and mRNA technology.
Today’s new funding will primarily be used to advance clinical trials and registration applications for GT801, as well as to expand the R&D team and build out the platform. This statement may sound simple, but it reflects an underlying corporate structure issue.
Shali itself has TIL, solid tumors, and pipelines such as GT101 and GT201 that are closer to registration and global development. Weitao represents a different risk profile: earlier stage, more platform-based, and closer to the potential of next-generation cell therapies.
Splitting it out makes the capital's risk appetite clear.
In a conversation with Wall Street Vision, Dr. Chen Kan, Partner at Qiming Venture Partners and Co-Head of Medical Innovation, noted that different investors have varying risk tolerances, and the spin-off allows for better alignment between “investment institutions with different risk appetites.”
This is a typical platform split logic.
TIL is a product line approaching the clinical deep water of solid tumors. In vivo CAR-T is a platform line that aims to redefine manufacturing and delivery paradigms. Keeping both within the same company would cause them to compete for valuation narratives, capital budgets, and management attention. By spinning them out, Weitao can raise funds at its own pace, answer the market with its own data, and attract global partners using its own platform insights.
This action cannot be viewed merely as asset reallocation.
More precisely, it involves managing assets with different maturities and risk-return profiles within distinct capital structures.
Clinical pain points are the starting point.
Why CAR-T in vivo gets reignited—the answer lies not in the technology itself, but in the clinical setting.
Dr. Chen Kan told Wall Street Journal that investment institutions are focused on in vivo CAR-T and allogeneic cell therapies, primarily because they “truly address the issue of therapy accessibility.” He also noted that in vivo CAR-T and allogeneic technologies have significant potential to reduce costs and enable scalable production.
This assessment aligns precisely with the industrial reality of traditional CAR-T over the past several years.
China has already approved several CAR-T therapies. Kite Pharma’s Claudin18.2 CAR-T has advanced solid tumor CAR-T to the stage of marketing application. Traditional CAR-T companies have done extensive groundwork for the industry: Fosun Kite and WuXi Juna completed the earliest commercial education efforts; Legend Biotech demonstrated with Carvykti that Chinese CAR-T therapies can reach global markets; and Kite Pharma has pushed the challenging goal of solid tumor CAR-T to the doorstep of regulatory approval.
But they all face a hard constraint: personalized manufacturing is inherently expensive, cycles are inherently longer, and quality control is inherently complex.
For patients with blood cancers, waiting itself is a risk. For patients with autoimmune diseases, if future treatment scales to larger populations, million-scale personalized therapies will be harder to adopt as standard care. For hospitals, every expansion of complex cell therapies requires reorganization of teams, facilities, processes, quality control, and payment systems.
The appeal of CAR-T within the body lies here.
It does not promise to immediately replace traditional CAR-T, but it does offer a technical pathway to reduce process complexity. This is also the foundation for recent consecutive overseas transactions: major pharmaceutical companies are not only focused on individual pipelines, but also on whether CAR-T can move closer to becoming a drug-like product from a hospital-based engineering process.
Early Data and Unresolved Questions
The technical keywords of Weitao are targeted LNP delivery and mRNA.
According to publicly available information, GT801 uses T cell-targeted lipid nanoparticles to deliver mRNA encoding an anti-CD19 CAR.
Abstract 148 from the 2026 AACR meeting disclosed preclinical and preliminary clinical results for GT801: optimized mRNA design enabled the T-LNP platform to achieve over 14 days of CAR expression in human PBMCs; in a human PBMC-reconstituted mouse model, a dose of 0.1 mpk achieved receptor-saturating delivery across multiple lymphoid tissues with off-target uptake below 1%; a single intravenous dose as low as 0.01 mpk achieved over 95% B-cell depletion. The abstract also noted that, in PBMCs from healthy donors and patients with autoimmune diseases, GT801 achieved over 90% B-cell killing within 24 hours at a dose as low as 0.1 μg.
This data is still very early-stage and should not be overstated.
But it has already touched on the industry’s most pressing concerns: Can sufficient CAR-T cells be safely produced without lymphodepletion? Can CAR expression be controlled with repeated dosing? Can targeted delivery reduce uptake by non-target cells? Can in vivo generation make therapy truly accessible?
During a conversation with Wall Street View this month, Dr. Liu Yarong, founder and CEO of Gravel Bio and founder and CEO of Weitao Bio, spoke with great restraint. She said that In Vivo CAR is a completely new therapeutic approach, and currently “there are no mature reference models—we must explore independently.” She also cautioned that no In Vivo CAR product has yet entered registered clinical trials, and a timeline of 5 to 6 years may be more realistic.
This is also the reality that current in vivo CAR-T companies must face.
Early clinical signals can increase market attention, but they are not sufficient to establish definitive conclusions. The next critical step is to use larger sample sizes, longer follow-up periods, and more standardized CMC systems to address regulatory, dosing, frequency, long-term safety, and indication selection questions.
Dr. Liu Yarong also mentioned that, three or four years ago, the decision to focus on shelf-based and in vivo CAR-T was because "accessibility has always been an issue." This statement also explains the industry context behind Weitao's choice of the in vivo CAR-T pathway.
From an industry perspective, this is also the key business assumption for in vivo CAR-T: whether cell therapy can be made accessible, available, and affordable to more patients.
Today’s enthusiasm for CAR-T therapy mirrors the surge of interest a decade ago when CAR-T was rediscovered by global capital. But today’s industry is more mature and more discerning. Concepts alone are no longer enough; investors look for clinical signals, multinational corporations seek platform extensibility, physicians demand real-world benefits, and patients wonder if they can wait.
The significance of Weitao’s this funding round may lie precisely here: it provides a clearer milestone for CAR-T in China, indicating that this approach is now entering a phase where platform development, funding validation, clinical validation, and industrialization validation are progressing in parallel.
This will not be a short-term race. Over the coming years, human data, regulatory feedback, production stability, and payment models will truly determine the trajectory of the in vivo CAR-T industry.