By Adam FeuersteinJuly 1, 2026
Adam Feuerstein, a senior writer and biotech columnist, is the author of Adam’s Biotech Scorecard, a subscriber-only newsletter about the crossroads of drug development, business, Wall Street, and biotechnology.
Adam Feuerstein is a senior writer and biotech columnist, reporting on the crossroads of drug development, business, Wall Street, and biotechnology. He is also a co-host of the weekly biotech podcast The Readout Loud and author of the newsletter Adam’s Biotech Scorecard. You can reach Adam on Signal at stataf.54.The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved a personalized T-cell therapy from Orca Bio, a private biotech company, that reduces the risk of a debilitating immune reaction in patients with blood cancers undergoing stem cell transplants.
The Orca therapy, called Tregzi, represents an alternative approach to traditional matched-donor stem cell transplantation that can be curative for certain patients with blood cancers, but also carries a high risk of chronic graft-versus-host disease and other long-term complications.
“This is going to be a really important option for leukemia patients,” said Nate Fernhoff, Orca’s CEO, in an interview with STAT. “Historically, the choice for a stem cell transplant carried a trade off — risks and complications that patients had to accept as part of treatment in search of a cure. With Tregzi’s approval, we hope to show that we can break that trade off, and that we can improve survival free from graft-versus-host disease.”
