Reader, beware: You’re entering haunted grounds.
Welcome to the Fierce Biotech Graveyard, a yearly ritual where we remember all the biotechs we lost in 2025. While we're embracing the spooky spirit of Halloween, we don’t take these closures lightly; a shuttered biotech means employees without jobs and patients without potential new treatments.
This year’s list features 16 biotechs that have shut down, with another three that have one foot in the grave. That brings the total to 19, a slight drop from last year’s 22 and a welcome departure from 2023’s record 27 closures.
Biotechs this year have had to contend with a tumultuous regulatory environment and a “complete standstill” of industry activity, especially in the first half of the year. Numerous frights have cropped up during President Donald Trump's second administration, including mass federal layoffs, the widespread termination of research funding, an ongoing government shutdown, tariffs on pharmaceuticals and a specter of drug pricing reform that has prompted multiple Big Pharmas to make deals with the White House.
Below are the 16 biotechs that have shuttered since Halloween of last year.
The cell therapy mausoleum
An entire wing of this year’s cemetery is dedicated to cell therapy, a modality that has experienced a massive shift in 2025.
Cell therapy biotechs Carisma Therapeutics, Oncternal Therapeutics, Abata Therapeutics and Appia Bio all closed up shop this year—even big-name partnerships weren’t enough to save them.
In April, Carisma stripped itself back to a skeleton staff, leaving just six employees to oversee a strategic review and wind-down. The macrophage-focused biotech later seemed to save itself by agreeing to a reverse merger with a private regenerative cell therapy company, Ocugen’s OrthoCellix. However, that deal fell apart in September, and Moderna cut ties with Carisma at the same time, leaving the biotech to “sell or otherwise dispose of or monetize its remaining assets.”
Moderna and Carisma had originally teamed up to tackle in vivo cell therapies for cancer in 2022. Ultimately, the Big Biotech decided to pay Carisma $4 million to walk away from the agreement.
Appia Bio, too, had once ridden high on a pharma deal. After raising a $52 million series A in 2021, the Los Angeles-based biotech inked a pact with Gilead Sciences' Kite Pharma that could have netted as much as $875 million. That deal expired in 2024, and Appia followed suit a year later after funding ran dry.
Many other cell therapy outfits survived to tell the tale but have laid off staffers along the way, with 20 layoff rounds occurring at cell and gene therapy biotechs in the first quarter of 2025.
This year has revealed the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of cell therapy. Many big players have walked away from the modality entirely, including Takeda, Novo Nordisk and Galapagos, while others have torn up multibillion-dollar deals, like Gilead’s Kite and Roche’s Genentech.
At the same time, pharmas and the federal government alike have been going all in on in vivo cell therapy. Kite inked an in vivo CAR-T deal with China’s Pregene Biopharma worth up to $1.64 billion biobucks, while Bristol Myers Squibb paid $1.5 billion to pull in Orbital Therapeutics, an in vivo biotech with a preclinical autoimmune program. And the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health recently unveiled a slew of new grants for in vivo cell therapy work. The full moon has come out this year, and cell therapy is transforming before our very eyes.
Then there’s Vor Bio. After declaring its intent to shut down in May, Vor was shocked back to life a month later with a $175 million private placement and potential $4 billion deal to license an autoimmune asset from China. The biotech—founded by award-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D.—formerly worked on gene-edited stem cell therapies for blood cancers. Vor has since become a mainstay of Fierce’s Chutes and Ladders column, building up a new leadership team to fit its new life.
While Vor has been reanimated like Frankenstein's monster, how the biotech will live out the new life it's been given remains to be seen.
Mad science
Speaking of mad scientists like Frankenstein, several biotechs that shuttered this year were trying to push the boundaries of medicine in exciting ways, even if they didn’t quite work out.
One San Diego biotech was trying to track down tiny therapeutic targets hidden in the deep recesses of the dark genome. Though Velia Therapeutics led a short life, the company’s founders said they remain committed to the “therapeutic potential of microproteins.”
Velia’s co-founder Alan Saghatelian, Ph.D., debuted a new tool for picking microproteins out of data sets later in the year and told Fierce Biotech at the time that Velia suffered from a lack of an initial development prospect; in that fundraising environment, biotechs didn't have the runway to sustain basic science programs.
Another biotech that was lost this year was trying to break new ground in the world of RNA medicines. Coded HC Bioscience, the company was attempting to develop a new treatment for hemophilia A that used transfer RNA, a vital group of molecules that deliver amino acids to proteins under construction. Spooked by early preclinical data, the biotech decided the challenges of pioneering a new class of medicines were too great.
Another biotech is notable not for how it was innovating new medicines but, instead, reinventing old ones. This year saw the end of Lyndra Therapeutics, which spun out of Moderna co-founder Robert Langer’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a decade ago. Lyndra’s goal was to create long-acting oral versions of medicines such that a week’s worth of medicine could be taken in a single dose, for example.
Lyndra raised a $101 million series E in 2023 and said at the time that it would use the cash on a long-acting version of schizophrenia drug risperidone, LYN-005, which the biotech then demonstrated could deliver the same medicine levels as the daily version in a phase 3 trial with 90 patients.
But further fundraising proved impossible, and Lyndra’s lofty dreams were consigned to the graveyard.
The living dead
In addition to the 16 newly buried biotechs, our list includes three others that wander the graveyard as listless spirits. Not quite dead, they straddle the realm of the living and the great mysterious beyond.
Seelos Therapeutics filed for bankruptcy after its amyotrophic lateral sclerosis candidate failed a phase 2/3 study. Trevena is in limbo, weighing its strategic options after ghosting its executives and whittling the staff down to just four employees. As Vor Bio has shown, any one of these biotechs could bounce back, though the odds are slim.
After the failure of its GSK-partnered TIGIT drug led the company to begin winding down, iTeos Therapeutics was saved from burial by instead being gobbled up on the cheap by Concentra Biosciences. Concentra and Xoma Royalty, a specialist in profiting off of rights to royalties and milestones, have been actively prowling the landscape this year for beleaguered biotechs to swallow whole. Turnstone Biologics was acquired by Xoma for less than $8 million after seemingly reaching the end of its road, while Essa Pharma was snatched up by a research nonprofit in a deal Xoma backed.
Pliant Therapeutics and Acelyrin both adopted “poison pill” defenses this year to fend off a ravenous Concentra, while Xoma has started ingesting Lava Therapeutics, Mural Oncology and Takeda spinout HilleVax. It’s a good bet that these purple biotech eaters will stay on the hunt for the rest of the year and into 2026.
Some biotechs have resorted to extreme—and strange—measures to survive 2025. Aptose Biosciences was on the cusp of insolvency when the company’s own CEO stepped in with a loan to keep the biotech afloat. Some other unusual strategies deployed by biotechs this year include buying a waste management business and shrinking staff salaries by 70%.
While these odd moves have staved off the reaper for now, these companies may still be joining us down in the biotech graveyard sooner rather than later. We all float down here!
This year can only be defined as undefinable. It’s impossible to say how many plots we'll need to set aside for 2026's graveyard, but we only hope it’s fewer than this year.