More than a year after reducing its workforce, Gamida Cell has resorted to layoffs to keep its long-delayed plans for its blood cancer treatment omidubicel on track.
Last November, the FDA revealed that it was unlikely to make an approval decision before May 1, three months later than previously predicted. According to a full-year earnings report issued Monday, Gamida was unable to gather the additional resources required to finally bring the off-the-shelf bone marrow stem cell transplant for blood cancer patients to market as planned due to a difficult funding environment.
As a result, Gamida made the “difficult” decision to deprioritize the company’s preclinical work on natural killer cell therapies, such as GDA-301, GDA-501, and GDA-601, which, according to Jenkins, “have demonstrated encouraging preclinical data that differentiate them from other NK cell therapy approaches.”
The efforts to “reduce expense across the board” also include a 17% reduction in head count. The majority of the job losses are related to the NK pipeline. Gamida will also close its Jerusalem operations and consolidate its Israeli operations at its Kiryat Gat manufacturing facility.
Gamida expects its cash to last only until the third quarter of the year, despite these changes and a $25 million loan taken out in December 2022.
