Mucommune Awarded ARPA-H Funding to Develop Novel In Vivo CAR-T Therapy for Cancer
November 17, 2025
Mucommune has been awarded an agreement to conduct research and development for up to $29.4 million over six years from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to develop a novel immunotherapy based on in vivo engineering of CAR-T cells for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer. This project is funded under ARPA-H’s Engineering of Immune Cells Inside the Body (EMBODY) program, led by ARPA-H Program Manager Daria Fedyukina, Ph.D.
Conventional ex vivo CAR-T cell therapy has shown remarkable success in treating certain blood cancers and holds significant promise for extending its impact to solid tumors. However, these CAR-T therapies are currently limited by the lengthy and costly ex vivo manufacturing process necessary to prepare the engineered T cells, the requirement for lymphodepletion, as well as by their modest efficacy against solid tumors.
Mucommune’s lentiviral transduction platform in-licensed from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill enables highly efficient and specific transduction and engineering of T cells in vivo without the need for prior T-cell activation. Mucommune will leverage support from the ARPA-H award to develop an in vivo engineered CAR-T product capable of specifically recognizing and eliminating lung cancer cells in the body, at costs orders of magnitude lower than current CAR-T therapies. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide. Academic institutions participating in the project include UNC – Chapel Hill as well as MD Anderson.
The project is designed to culminate in completion of a proof-of-concept clinical trial. If successful, it could significantly expand the clinical adoption of CAR-T therapy by lowering costs, increasing patient access, improving safety and enhancing efficacy against solid tumors, and potentially establishing in vivo CAR-T therapy as a front-line treatment for NSCLC and other cancers.
“We are grateful for the ARPA-H award and to join the pioneering EMBODY program,” said Ming Yang, Ph.D., co-PI of the award who recently joined Mucommune as its Chief R&D Officer spearheading the in vivo CAR-T initiative. “We believe this is a clear recognition of the unique advantages afforded by our unique platform and approach.”
The PI on this ARPA-H-funded project is Thomas Moench, M.D., VP Clinical Development who has over 3 decades of experience advancing multiple products into clinical development. “Our vision is to transform CAR-T therapy into an accessible, frontline cancer treatment, offering patients a safer and more effective alternative to conventional therapies. We believe that in situ–engineered CAR-T cell therapy holds the potential to overcome the barriers of solid tumors and dramatically improve outcomes for people living with various solid tumors that remain exceedingly difficult to treat with currently available therapies.”
“This is a watershed moment in Mucommune’s evolution into an integrated R&D company after successfully advancing a pipeline of inhaled monoclonal antibody therapies for respiratory infections leading to spinoff of clinical stage Inhalon Biopharma, and more recently advancing a platform of interventions for improving female reproductive health, including a biologics-based non-hormonal contraception,” said Sam Lai, Professor of Pharmacoengineering and Molecular Pharmaceutics at UNC – Chapel Hill, and Founder of Mucommune. “We believe the exciting progress speaks directly to the talented team and a culture of innovation we have built”.
Alongside the ARPA-H–funded project, Mucommune is expanding the application of its platform technology to develop in vivo CAR-T therapies addressing additional solid tumors and autoimmune diseases.
About Mucommune, LLC
Mucommune, LLC is an integrated biotechnology R&D company that builds on nearly a decade of pioneering pharmaceutical research on mucosal immunotherapeutics, has advanced multiple clinical stage assets, and incubated technology platforms that have received over $100M to date in support of active clinical and preclinical development. Leveraging this strong scientific foundation, Mucommune has expanded its R&D efforts to develop in vivo engineered immune cell therapies. Our mission is to translate innovative immunoengineering approaches into transformative therapeutic platforms that address significant unmet medical needs.
This research was funded, in part, by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Government.