In vivo CAR-T enters the financing verification phase.

```

Over the past year, In Vivo (in-body) CAR-T has reentered the capital spotlight, with several deals reigniting commercial imagination for this approach.

AbbVie announced in 2025 the acquisition of Capstan for up to $2.1 billion. AstraZeneca acquired EsoBiotec. Eli Lilly, in April 2026, announced the acquisition of Kelonia for up to $7 billion.

The successive moves by several MNCs indicate that in vivo CAR-T has become a core platform they are eager to secure for next-generation therapies. Lilly’s $7 billion deal demonstrates the potential of this therapy.

Capital’s interest in in vivo CAR-T still centers on the industrialization issues that traditional CAR-T has not fully resolved.

Traditional CAR-T has proven the therapeutic ceiling of cell therapy. Companies like Fosun Kite, WuXi Junuo, Legend Biotech, Reindeer Biotech, Heyuan Biotech, and Kozi Pharmaceuticals have pushed China’s CAR-T from concept to approval, manufacturing, hospital admissions, and payment negotiations. However, the industry increasingly realizes that the real difficulties have never been just in getting approval.

The difficulty is whether the patients can afford to wait. The difficulty is whether hospitals can scale up to handle it. The difficulty is how million-dollar pricing can be digested by the payment system. The difficulty is how the logic of one-person-one-drug manufacturing can become a sustainable business.

In vivo CAR-T attracts capital because it tries to rewrite all these challenges: reducing the steps of cell extraction, modification, expansion, quality control, and reinfusion—these ex vivo steps—by delivering genetic instructions into the patient’s body, enabling the patient’s own T cells to generate CAR-T in vivo.

If this path is validated by clinical data, the structure of cell therapy manufacturing and payment logic could change.

Against this backdrop, on April 29th, Mitau Bio announced the completion of consecutive Series A and Series A+ financings, totaling over $50 million.

According to shareholder information disclosed by the company, top venture capital institutions are gathering, and the purpose of capital positioning in vivo CAR-T is clear. Zhengxingu Capital and Decheng Capital are the lead investors, followed by OrbiMed, Hankang Capital, Eisai Innovation Venture Fund, C&D Emerging Investment, as well as existing shareholders Qiming Venture Partners, Shunxi Fund, and Xingze Capital.

For an early-stage company focused on in vivo CAR-T, spun out from Gravel Bio, such a combination means in vivo CAR-T has entered a clearer stage of institutional pricing.

Why Did Mitau Split Off?

Mitau Bio originates from Gravel Bio’s in vivo CAR-T platform.

Public records show Mitau was founded on June 25, 2025, developing in vivo CAR-T pipelines based on a targeted LNP delivery system, focusing on hematologic malignancies and autoimmune diseases. The core project GT801 is a T-LNP and mRNA-based CD19 in vivo CAR-T candidate.

The new funding will mainly go toward clinical trials and regulatory filings for GT801, as well as expanding the R&D team and building the platform. This statement is plain, but reflects a corporate structure issue.

Gravel itself has TIL and solid tumors, and pipelines like GT101 and GT201, which are closer to registration and global development. Mitau represents a different risk curve: earlier stage, more platform-oriented, closer to the imaginative space of next-generation cell therapy.

The most immediate benefit of spinning it off is clarifying capital risk preferences.

This month, in a conversation with Wallstreetcn, Dr. Kan Chen, partner and co-head of Healthcare Innovation at Qiming Venture Partners, commented regarding the spin-off of Mitau from Gravel that different investors have different tolerance for risk, and spin-offs allow “investors with different risk preferences” to be better matched.

This is a typical platform spin-off logic.

TIL is a line that approaches the deep clinical waters of solid tumors. In vivo CAR-T is a platform line for rebuilding manufacturing and administration paradigms. If housed together in one company, they would compete for valuation language, capital budgets, and management attention. After the spin-off, Mitau can raise funds at its own pace, answer the market with its own data, and use its platform data to attract global collaborators.

This move shouldn’t be seen as just asset reallocation.

More precisely, it entails managing assets of different maturity and risk-reward characteristics within different capital structures.

Clinical Pain Points Are the Starting Point

The reignition of interest in in vivo CAR-T is not about the technology itself, but about the clinical realities.

Dr. Kan Chen told Wallstreetcn that the focus of investment institutions on in vivo CAR-T and allogeneic cell therapy is “truly solving the accessibility issue” of therapy. He also mentioned these technologies have significant potential for cost reduction and scalable manufacturing.

This judgment matches the industry reality of traditional CAR-T in recent years.

China already has multiple approved CAR-T products, and Kozi Pharmaceutical's Claudin18.2 CAR-T has reached the stage of regulatory application for solid tumors. Traditional CAR-T companies have done extensive industry groundwork: Fosun Kite and WuXi Junuo provided the earliest commercialization education, Legend Biotech proved with Carvykti that China’s CAR-T can go global, Kozi pushed solid tumor CAR-T to the regulatory threshold.

But they face a shared constraint: individualized manufacturing is inherently expensive, naturally lengthy, and quality control is inherently complex.

For hematologic malignancy patients, waiting itself is a risk. For autoimmune disease patients, individualized therapies costing millions are even harder to become routine if larger populations are to be treated in the future. For hospitals, every expansion of complex cell therapies means reorganizing teams, facilities, processes, quality control, and payment.

This is where the appeal of in vivo CAR-T lies.

It does not promise to immediately replace traditional CAR-T but does provide a technological path to reduce procedural complexity. This is also the basis for the recent string of overseas deals: big pharma is interested not just in single pipelines but whether CAR-T can move further from hospital engineering to drug-like products.

Early Data and Unresolved Issues

Mitau’s technology keywords are targeted LNP delivery and mRNA.

According to public information, GT801 uses T cell-targeting lipid nanoparticles to deliver mRNA encoding anti-CD19 CAR.

The 2026 AACR conference Abstract 148 disclosed preclinical and early clinical results for GT801: The optimized mRNA design enabled the T-LNP platform to achieve over 14 days of CAR expression in human PBMCs; in human PBMC-reconstituted mouse models, a 0.1 mpk dose achieved receptor-saturating delivery in multiple lymphoid tissues with off-target uptake under 1%; a single intravenous dose as low as 0.01 mpk cleared over 95% of B cells. The abstract also noted that in healthy donor and autoimmune patient-derived PBMCs, GT801 at doses as low as 0.1 μg could kill over 90% of B cells within 24 hours.

This data is still very early and should not be overblown.

But it touches on the industry’s most critical concerns: Can sufficient CAR-T be produced safely without lymphodepletion? Is CAR expression controllable with repeat dosing? Does targeted delivery reduce off-target cell uptake? Can in vivo generation make the therapy genuinely accessible?

This month, in a conversation with Wallstreetcn, Dr. Yaron Liu, founder and CEO of Gravel Bio and Mitau Bio, also spoke cautiously. She said, In Vivo CAR is a brand new therapeutic method and “there is no mature framework to reference, only independent exploration.” She also reminded that no in vivo CAR products have entered registration clinical trials globally, and 5–6 years may be a more realistic timeline.

This is the reality currently faced by in vivo CAR-T companies.

Early clinical signals can raise market attention but are not sufficient for definitive conclusions. What comes next is more critical: answering questions on regulation, dosing, frequency, long-term safety, and indications selection with larger samples, longer follow-up, and more standardized CMC systems.

Dr. Yaron Liu also mentioned that persisting with shelf-ready and in vivo CAR-T 3–4 years ago was because “accessibility is always an issue.” This statement explains the industrial context for Mitau’s choice of the in vivo CAR-T route.

From an industry perspective, this is also the core commercial assumption of in vivo CAR-T: Can cell therapy become accessible, usable, and affordable for more patients?

The hype around in vivo CAR-T today is reminiscent of when CAR-T was rediscovered globally by capital ten years ago. But today the industry is more mature and more demanding. Concepts alone are no longer enough; capital wants clinical signals, MNCs want platform externalities, doctors want real patient benefits, and patients want to know if they can wait for it.

The significance of Mitau’s latest financing may lie here: It gives China’s in vivo CAR-T a clearer interim marker—this route is moving from platform conception into concurrent stages of fundraising validation, clinical validation, and industrial validation.

This will not be a short-run track. The coming years of human data, regulatory feedback, manufacturing stability, and payment models will truly shape the direction of the in vivo CAR-T industry.

Risk Warning and DisclaimerThe market has risks, and investment needs caution. This article does not constitute personal investment advice and has not taken into account any individual user's special investment objectives, financial situation, or needs. Users should consider whether any opinions, viewpoints, or conclusions herein fit their particular circumstances. Investing based on this article is at your own risk. ```