The CRISPR company, co-founded by Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, is ending its cell-therapy programs and exploring a sale, while BioMarin is cutting more than 100 manufacturing jobs in Marin County.
By Staff Reporter
Caribou Biosciences, the Berkeley gene-editing company that grew out of one of the most celebrated scientific discoveries to emerge from a Bay Area university, has told California regulators that it will permanently close its headquarters site and lay off 87 workers, the latest sign of strain in the region’s biotechnology industry.
The company filed a notice under the state’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act on Oct. 6 covering its site at 2929 Seventh Street in West Berkeley, with the closure taking effect Dec. 7, according to state filings compiled by Today’s Layoffs.
Ending the CAR-T programs
The layoffs follow a decision by Caribou’s board on Oct. 2 to restructure the company, which it disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company said it would discontinue clinical trials and further development of its two allogeneic CAR-T cell therapies, vispacabtagene regedleucel, or vispa-cel, for relapsed or refractory B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and CB-011, for relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma.
Allogeneic, or “off-the-shelf,” CAR-T therapies are built from donor immune cells rather than a patient’s own, an approach that promised to make the powerful cancer treatments faster and cheaper to deliver. Caribou used CRISPR gene editing to engineer those cells.
The board also began a process to explore “strategic alternatives,” including a merger, acquisition or other transaction, and hired Wedbush Securities as its financial adviser. The company said it had set no timeline for the review and could not assure that it would result in any transaction.
Caribou was blunt about the cause. The board acted, the filing said, “in view of the current financing environment for allogeneic CAR-T cell therapies, which has made it increasingly challenging to secure the capital necessary to responsibly advance the Company’s allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy programs.”
The company estimated that the restructuring would cost $15 million to $19 million, including $10 million to $11 million in severance and related costs and $5 million to $8 million to wind down its ANTLER and CaMMouflage early-stage clinical trials. Most affected employees are expected to leave in the fourth quarter, with a small group remaining to support a potential transaction and wind-down. The company said it would continue a long-term follow-up study of patients previously treated with its investigational products.
The employment of the company’s chief financial officer, Sriram Ryali, will end when Caribou signs a definitive agreement for a strategic transaction, the filing said.
A Berkeley origin story
Caribou’s retreat carries symbolic weight in the East Bay. The company was co-founded in 2011 by scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, including Jennifer Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique. For more than a decade, Caribou was one of the most visible commercial expressions of that work, and of Berkeley’s ambitions as a biotech hub alongside its better-known neighbors in South San Francisco and Emeryville.
The company’s Nasdaq-listed shares trade under the ticker CRBU.
Cuts in Marin as well
Across the bay, BioMarin Pharmaceutical, the rare-disease drugmaker based in San Rafael and one of Marin County’s largest private employers, filed its own WARN notice on Sept. 24. The company is eliminating 117 positions in California, 114 of them at its manufacturing site at 105 Digital Drive in Novato, effective Dec. 4, The Press Democrat reported. Two other California positions are in San Mateo and one is in Sacramento, and two more are outside the state.
A company spokesperson told Fierce Pharma that BioMarin was consolidating its Novato operations into “a smaller, more focused site.” Novato “will remain BioMarin’s primary drug substance manufacturing site for Aldurazyme and Naglazyme, while activities related to other products and facilities will be transferred, divested or decommissioned,” the spokesperson said, adding that the decision was “not related to any recent pipeline updates.”
BioMarin’s situation differs sharply from Caribou’s. The company closed a $4.8 billion acquisition of Amicus Therapeutics in April and reported second-quarter revenue of $990 million, up 20 percent from a year earlier, according to The Press Democrat. Its cuts reflect consolidation by a large, profitable company rather than a fight for survival. BioMarin also said it plans to convert an office building at 781 Lincoln Avenue in San Rafael into a laboratory, after abandoning a long-planned downtown campus expansion earlier this year.
A region under pressure
The two notices add to a broad wave of job reductions across the Bay Area’s technology economy. Genentech, the South San Francisco biotech pioneer, announced 103 layoffs at its headquarters in July, The Press Democrat noted. In software and hardware, technology companies had announced roughly 13,900 Bay Area layoffs this year through mid-September, about 37 percent more than in all of 2025, The Mercury News reported, with Oracle, Uber and PayPal accounting for most of the 1,196 cuts filed in September alone.
Biotech, however, is a different kind of bellwether. Its fortunes depend less on product cycles than on investors’ willingness to finance years of costly clinical work before any revenue arrives. Caribou’s own explanation, that capital for its class of therapies has become too hard to raise, speaks to that dependence. Some industry data point to stabilization: The Press Democrat, citing BioSpace, reported that biotech and pharmaceutical layoffs in August were down 90 percent from a year earlier.
For workers, the timeline is short. California’s WARN law generally requires 60 days’ notice before a mass layoff or closure, meaning most of the affected Caribou and BioMarin employees will be out of work in early December. Those affected can file for unemployment insurance with the state Employment Development Department, and county workforce boards in Alameda and Marin offer job-search and retraining assistance.
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