Capstan Therapeutics

Team Capstan is making the most of the beautiful San Diego summer by enjoying quality time outdoors with colleagues and families! Our recent annual Summer Family Picnic at Park Commons San Diego was a fantastic success, featuring live music, team-building activities, and delicious local cuisine.   We cherish these opportunities to connect outside the office, reinforcing our mission to cultivate an inclusive and vibrant culture so that we can continue to do our best work for patients. Big thanks to Alexandria Events San Diego and Exos for helping us organize such a successful event!   #CapstanTx #LifeScienceCulture  

Capstan Co-Founder Carl June is a pioneer in CAR T-cell therapy. In this Forbes article by Juergen Eckhardt, Dr. June delves into the vast potential that CAR T holds for an expansive amount of therapeutic applications, as well as the potential safety, efficiency, and cost benefits of in vivo engineering.    Capstan is leveraging the power of in vivo CAR T to generate transformative therapies with applications across a broad range of disease areas.   Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eg7piMSw

How is Capstan advancing the game-changing field of in vivo CAR-T? Our CMO Ramin Farzaneh-Far, M.D., spoke with PharmaVoice about the potential to retain the positive benefits of CAR-T but eliminate the drawbacks of autologous and allogeneic approaches, bringing the benefits to more patients and new indications including #autoimmunedisorders. The article also discusses the technical considerations for developing in vivo CAR-T therapies, including Capstan’s targeted lipid nanoparticle delivery. Don’t miss this timely conversation: https://lnkd.in/gM9zTPxi

At Capstan, commitment is one of our core values – commitment to patients, colleagues, and our families. Last month, we had the pleasure of hosting Bring Your Kids to Work Day, where Capstaneers had the opportunity to introduce their children to what we do at Capstan and our focus on improving the lives of patients.     The kids had the chance to visit our lab space, learn about our equipment, participate in a pipetting competition, and more. We also held an educational session that dove deep into our science and approach hosted by Co-Founder and Vice President of Research, Haig Aghajanian, Ph.D. It was an exciting day, jam packed with activities that provided valuable learning opportunities for the kids of Capstan.    Thank you to everyone who participated and made the event such a success! #CapstanTx #LNP #mRNA #LifeScienceCulture #KidsAtWork

Next month Capstan will attend the 45th Annual Goldman Sachs Global Healthcare Conference. More in today’s release: https://lnkd.in/e7b_mZUK

Next week, two of Capstan’s Co-Founders Bruce Levine, Ph.D., and Haig Aghajanian, Ph.D., will attend ISCT, International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy 2024 and join other industry leaders in various sessions focused on both enabling gene editing platforms for novel in vivo and ex vivo therapeutics, and the benefits of mRNA therapeutics. At Capstan, we are developing targeted in vivo RNA-based therapies to create the next generation of transformative therapies.

Tomorrow our Director of RNA Platform Technology Development, Daiki Matsuda, Ph.D., will give a presentation at the 3rd Annual Next Generation RNA Therapeutics Summit by World RNA Series. Dr. Matsuda will discuss the benefits of our RNA-based targeted LNP platform that enables in vivo engineering of immune cells to target a broad range of disease areas, including #autoimmune disorders, #oncology, and #fibrosis. 

“That process [in vivo] should make it much, much simpler and cheaper to deliver CAR-T. With conventional CAR-T therapies, patients have to undergo chemotherapy to destroy their existing T cells. But with in vivo CAR-T, this step isn’t necessary. And because these therapies don't require any cell manipulation outside the patient's body, you could take it in an outpatient clinic. You wouldn’t need specialized centers,” says Priya Karmali, Ph.D., our Chief Technology Officer, in this piece from MIT Technology Review by Cassandra Willyard.   Read more about the potential that in vivo CAR T has on the future, as well as the overall cost, of the therapeutic treatment landscape in the article below.

Targeted lipid nanoparticles (tLNP), the foundation of our therapeutic platform for targeted in vivo delivery of RNA to specific cell types, are one of the most promising new therapeutic modalities. Next week at the Festival of Biologics, our Associate Director, Antibody CMC QC (Qian-Chen) Yong will present on general considerations when selecting a targeting antibody, a critical component for the tLNP.

At Capstan, we are committed to building a company that represents the multitude of voices, values, and perspectives that is reflective of our world today – including celebrating various holidays throughout the year. Last month, we honored Lunar New Year, Easter, Holi, Nowruz, Purim, the beginning of Ramadan, and Saint Patrick’s Day as a team by decorating, bringing in various foods, and participating in activities and traditions together as a team.   Want to be a Capstaneer? View our open positions on our website: https://lnkd.in/eiU8hT7y