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Immuneel Therapeutics and Tata Memorial Centre Have Partnered to Build India's Cell and Gene Therapy Research Ecosystem — Bengaluru Meets Mumbai's Top Cancer Hospital

By Mustafa Shariff, Editor in Chief · July 21,2026 · 2 min read

Mustafa Shariff, Editor in Chief — Immuneel Therapeutics and Tata Memorial Centre Have Partnered to Build India's Cell and Gene Therapy Research Ecosystem — Bengaluru Meets Mumbai's Top Cancer Hospital

Summary

  • Immuneel Therapeutics and Tata Memorial Centre Sign MoU for Cell and Gene Therapy Research — Building India's Advanced Oncology Innovation Ecosystem
  • mmuneel Therapeutics, developer of India's first indigenous CAR-T therapy, has signed an MoU with Tata Memorial Centre to accelerate clinical and translational cell and gene therapy research in India.

"India stands at an important inflection point in the evolution of advanced therapeutics, and collaborations such as this are critical to building a globally competitive innovation ecosystem. Our partnership with Immuneel reflects a shared commitment to accelerating cutting-edge cell and gene therapy research while ensuring that transformative cancer treatments become more accessible to patients in India. By combining scientific innovation, clinical excellence, and indigenous capabilities, we hope to create meaningful impact in the future of oncology care."

Immuneel Therapeutics Private Limited, the Bengaluru-based pioneer of India's indigenous cell and gene therapy sector, signed a strategic Memorandum of Understanding with Tata Memorial Centre on July 15, 2026, formalising a collaboration aimed at accelerating clinical and translational research in advanced cell and gene therapies across India. The MoU was signed in Bengaluru and covers collaborative research, product development support, clinical programme design, and patient access initiatives across the cell and gene therapy therapeutic categories in which Immuneel has established India's most advanced indigenous capabilities.
Tata Memorial Centre — an autonomous institution under the administrative control of the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India — is India's oldest and most comprehensive cancer hospital complex, spanning the Tata Memorial Hospital in Parel, Mumbai, and ACTREC (Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer) in Navi Mumbai. TMC has a singular track record in oncology in India: it was the site of India's first linear accelerator (1978), first bone marrow transplant (1983), first PET/CT (2004), and it spearheaded the CAR-T cell trial that led to the approval of India's first indigenous CAR-T cell therapy. It serves approximately 80,000 new patients annually, of whom approximately 60% receive free or subsidised treatment.
What Immuneel Has Built
Immuneel Therapeutics was founded with a specific and ambitious mission: to make breakthrough cancer treatments — cell therapies, gene therapies, and immunotherapies — accessible to patients in India, where they have historically been unavailable or unaffordably priced. Immuneel developed NexCAR19, India's first indigenous CD19-targeted CAR-T cell therapy for B-cell cancers including B-cell lymphomas and B-cell ALL (Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia), receiving CDSCO marketing authorisation — making NexCAR19 the first indigenously developed and manufactured CAR-T therapy approved in India and among the first in the emerging market world.
The significance of indigenous CAR-T development is not merely symbolic. CAR-T cell therapies manufactured by Western companies (Novartis's Kymriah, Bristol Myers Squibb's Breyanzi and Abecma) cost $300,000-500,000 per infusion in Western markets — a price point that is inaccessible to the vast majority of Indian cancer patients. Immuneel's indigenous development and manufacturing pathway enables significantly lower pricing, which combined with India's scale of cancer patient need (approximately 15.7 lakh new cases annually), creates a market opportunity that was previously theoretically enormous but practically inaccessible.
Amit Mookim, Board Director and CEO of Immuneel Therapeutics, articulated the institutional intent: this collaboration with Tata Memorial Centre is a significant step toward strengthening India's innovation ecosystem in oncology and improving access to next-generation therapies for patients with difficult-to-treat cancers.
Why Tata Memorial Centre Is the Right Partner
The collaboration with TMC directly activates the most important institutional lever in Indian oncology: the clinical validation and patient access pathway that flows through India's most trusted and highest-volume cancer hospital complex. TMC's ACTREC was the site of the CAR-T cell trials that generated the clinical data for India's first indigenous CAR-T therapy approval — meaning the institution already has the protocol expertise, ethics committee infrastructure, regulatory relationship management, and specialised clinical nursing capabilities that advanced cell therapy programmes require.
Dr Navin Khattry, Deputy Director Clinical Services at ACTREC and a nationally recognised expert in haematological malignancies and stem cell transplantation, represents exactly the clinical depth that Immuneel's technology requires to translate from approved product to standard-of-care delivery at scale. His framing of the collaboration captures the institutional ambition: combining scientific innovation, clinical excellence, and indigenous capabilities to create meaningful impact in the future of oncology care.
The CLAA Regulatory Context
The Immuneel-TMC collaboration arrives immediately after the Central Government's July 2 amendment of the Drugs Rules, 1945 to bring CAR-T cell therapies under the CLAA centralised licensing framework (covered in BHC Media's July 7 edition). This regulatory change — requiring joint CDSCO and state drug authority oversight for all cell and gene therapy products — creates both a more demanding and a more clearly defined pathway for future CAR-T products that the Immuneel-TMC research collaboration will generate clinical data for.
BHC Perspective
At Bengaluru Health Community, the Immuneel-Tata Memorial Centre MoU is one of the most consequential healthcare innovation partnerships of 2026. A Bengaluru company that built India's first indigenous CAR-T therapy is partnering with India's most respected cancer hospital to systematically build the clinical evidence base that will make advanced cell and gene therapies accessible to India's cancer patients. For BHC founders in oncology technology, cell therapy manufacturing, or clinical data infrastructure — this partnership defines the ecosystem you are building for.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What did Immuneel and Tata Memorial Centre sign?
A: A strategic MoU on July 15, 2026 for collaboration on clinical and translational research in advanced cell and gene therapies, combining Immuneel's product development, manufacturing, and market access expertise with TMC's clinical research excellence and ACTREC's cancer care capabilities.
Q: What is Immuneel Therapeutics known for?
A: Developing NexCAR19 — India's first indigenous CD19-targeted CAR-T cell therapy for B-cell lymphomas and B-cell ALL — which received CDSCO approval, making it the first indigenously developed and manufactured CAR-T therapy in India and significantly more affordable than Western alternatives.
Q: Why is this partnership with Tata Memorial Centre significant?
A: TMC's ACTREC was the site of the CAR-T cell trials that generated data for India's first CAR-T approval. The institution has the protocol expertise, ethics infrastructure, regulatory relationship management, and specialised clinical capabilities that advanced cell therapy programmes require to move from approved product to standard-of-care delivery.