GCTx Taps Haviland as Chair, Unveils AI-Powered Cell Therapy Pipeline

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – January 09, 2026 – GC Therapeutics (GCTx), a biotechnology firm aiming to redefine cellular medicine, today announced a series of strategic advancements that signal a major push toward the clinic. The company has appointed biotech veteran Kate Haviland as Chair of its Board of Directors and unveiled ambitious initial pipeline programs targeting multiple sclerosis and Type 1 Diabetes. These moves are bolstered by positive interactions with global regulators and significant progress with its proprietary AI-driven cell programming platform, TFome™.

Founded in 2019, the Cambridge-based company is leveraging a combination of high-throughput biology, machine learning, and a war chest of $75 million in funding to tackle some of the most persistent challenges in creating scalable and effective cell therapies. The recent announcements mark a transition from foundational platform development to focused therapeutic application, positioning GCTx as a company to watch in the rapidly evolving regenerative medicine landscape.

A New Era of Strategic Leadership

The appointment of Kate Haviland as Board Chair brings formidable strategic and commercial expertise to GC Therapeutics at a critical inflection point. Haviland is widely respected for her leadership at Blueprint Medicines, where she served as president and chief executive officer, having previously held the roles of chief operating officer and chief business officer. She was a primary architect in transforming Blueprint from a research-stage company into a fully integrated, commercial organization, steering the successful global launches of its first two precision therapies, AYVAKIT® and GAVRETO®.

Her track record extends across multiple high-growth biotech firms, including Idera Pharmaceuticals, Sarepta Therapeutics, and Genzyme, with a focus on advancing novel therapies for rare diseases and oncology. This deep experience in navigating the complexities of clinical development, regulatory strategy, and commercialization is seen as invaluable for GCTx as it prepares to move its first programs toward human trials.

“GC Therapeutics is tackling the most persistent challenges in cell therapy with a platform that is both scientifically compelling and operationally scalable,” said Kate Haviland in the company’s press release. “The company’s approach to cellular programming, manufacturing, and regulatory strategy positions it as a leader who can meaningfully expand patient access to transformative therapies. I am excited to support the team as they move into the clinic.”

The 'Plug-and-Play' Revolution

At the heart of GCTx's strategy is its TFome™ platform, a technology developed in the renowned lab of Dr. George Church at Harvard Medical School. The company describes it as the world’s first “plug-and-play” cellular programming system, designed to replace traditional, slow, and often unreliable methods of cell differentiation.

For decades, creating specific therapeutic cell types from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) has been a complex process of trial and error, requiring bespoke cocktails of growth factors and signaling molecules for each cell type. GCTx’s platform bypasses this by directly controlling the master regulators of cell identity: transcription factors (TFs). By screening millions of TF combinations in living human cells, the company has built an enormous dataset it calls the Cell State Cookbook™ (CSC™). This 'cookbook' is powered by AI foundation models that learn the rules of cell state transitions, enabling the company to precisely and rapidly engineer iPSCs into virtually any desired cell type.

“For decades, cell therapy has relied on trial-and-error approaches to cell identity,” stated Parastoo Khoshakhlagh, Ph.D., co-founder and chief executive officer of GCTx. “At GCTx, we are replacing that paradigm with a system that learns from biology at scale and translates those into new classes of medicines.”

The company claims its system can achieve a single-step, four-day differentiation process with over 90% efficiency—a dramatic improvement in speed and consistency that could be up to 100 times faster than conventional methods. This efficiency is critical for manufacturing off-the-shelf cell therapies at a scale and cost that could make them accessible to broad patient populations.

New Hope for Intractable Chronic Diseases

With its platform maturing, GCTx has unveiled its first therapeutic targets: demyelinating neurological disorders, including multiple sclerosis (MS), and metabolic diseases, with a focus on Type 1 Diabetes (T1D). Both areas represent immense unmet medical needs where regenerative medicine holds transformative potential.

Multiple sclerosis, which affects nearly one million people in the U.S. and almost three million globally, is characterized by the immune system attacking and destroying myelin, the protective sheath around nerve fibers. While current therapies primarily modulate the immune system to slow disease progression, there is a profound need for treatments that can repair this damage—a process called remyelination—and restore lost neurological function. A cell therapy capable of generating myelin-producing cells could offer a truly regenerative approach, moving beyond disease management to functional recovery.

Similarly, Type 1 Diabetes is an autoimmune disease that destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas, leaving patients dependent on lifelong insulin therapy. Affecting nearly 1.6 million Americans, T1D carries a heavy burden of daily management and long-term complications. The holy grail for T1D treatment is the replacement of these lost beta cells. GCTx’s regenerative cell therapy program aims to do just that, using its TFome™ platform to efficiently manufacture functional, insulin-producing cells that could restore the body’s natural ability to control blood sugar.

Paving the Path to the Clinic

A major hurdle for any company developing novel cell therapies is the regulatory pathway. GCTx announced it has had “productive interactions” with both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). According to the company, these agencies endorsed the TFome™-enabled development model and supported a streamlined regulatory pathway. While not a formal designation, this positive early feedback suggests that regulators are receptive to the company's platform-based approach, which promises a consistent and well-characterized manufacturing process—a key concern for advanced therapies.

This progress is underpinned by strong financial backing. GCTx has raised $75 million to date, including a $65 million Series A round led by Cormorant Asset Management with participation from other top-tier investors like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health and Mubadala Capital. This level of investment reflects significant market confidence in the company's science and strategy. This combination of capital, leadership, and regulatory encouragement sets the stage for what the company hopes will be a pivotal year in its mission to redefine cell therapy.