Exclusive: Replay plucks Allogene CMO Arun Balakumaran to lead trials at its cell and gene therapy biotechs

Katy Rezvani

Arun Balakumaran remembers working down the corridor at the NIH from fellow researcher Katy Rezvani back in the aughts. He never pictured the duo working together one day at a biotech company.

But starting Monday, he’ll be chief medical officer of cell and gene therapy incubator Replay and its portfolio company Syena.

The cell therapy upstart teamed up with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to create Syena, which was unveiled in February. Rezvani is a co-founder of Syena, which plans to start two clinical trials by year’s end in solid tumors and hematological malignancies. Rezvani’s work has led to licensed programs at Takeda and Affimed, as well.

Balakumaran most recently was chief medical officer of Arie Belldegrun’s off-the-shelf cell therapy maker Allogene Therapeutics.

His hire comes at a key moment for Replay, a $55 million-seeded company launched last year by Adrian Woolfson, Replay’s co-founder and the former R&D chief at Sangamo. In an interview, Woolfson said Replay had been waiting to fill the CMO post until finding someone like Balakumaran, whose résumé includes 4-year stints at Allogene, Merck and Amgen.

Adrian Woolfson

“We needed someone like Arun, who is an MD-PhD, who could actually cover such a broad range of different scientific modalities from gene therapy to cell therapy to genome writing to hypoimmunogenic platforms to rewriting enzymes,” Woolfson said. “You need someone who’s a physician and a scientist who can really get to grips with these kinds of technologies.”

As both Syena’s CMO and medical chief of the whole Replay apparatus, Balakumaran will oversee the two trials, which are expected to dose a few patients this year. He’ll also advance work across Replay’s three other startups, which are exploring HSV gene therapies for Parkinson’s, eye diseases and a skin condition. The fledgling biotechs under the Replay unbrella include Eudora, Alenis Therapeutics and Epoch Therapeutics.

Woolfson said a chief operating officer is the next hire, coming “relatively soon,” and more news on the financing front will come “in due course.” KKR, OMX Ventures, ARTIS Ventures and Lansdowne Partners bankroll the biotech, which has operations in San Diego and London.

As a clinical fellow, Balakumaran helped give the first mesenchymal cells to a patient as part of a compassionate use program in 2005. The stem cells, found in bone marrow, help repair skeletal tissues. After that, he headed to Amgen in the early 2010s, then worked on product development for hematology at Merck until 2018, when he landed at Allogene.

When a recruiter asked him what it would take him to leave Allogene for a new role, Balakumaran rattled off a list of wants, like payload capacity and a better hypoimmunogeneic platform.

“This guy was all smiles on the Zoom. He said, ‘I know a company which does all of this and more,’” Balakumaran said.

He’ll be joining a company with scientific advisors like Carl June, Bob Langer, Roger Kornberg and Pamela Silver. They gathered in Napa Valley recently for their first scientific advisory board meeting, Woolfson said, and in the coming months, they plan to announce more details around Replay’s GMP commercial supply.

That’s “quite unusual for a company of our stage to already be nailing down commercial supply,” Woolfson said, “but that’s the degree of confidence we’ve got based upon [the] anticipated read-through from Katy’s CAR-NK data because it’s the same manufacturing process. “We flip the CAR for a TCR.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct Woolfson’s quote about the manufacturing process.

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