Newsletter Signup - Under Article / In Page
"*" indicates required fields
At the end of each year, Labiotech selects a list of biotech companies it believes are worth keeping an eye on for the coming year. In December 2023, we highlighted nine biotech companies as “ones to watch” for 2024. Now, in 2025, about 18 months later, it’s time to ask the question: how did those biotech picks hold up?
Biotech progress is rarely straightforward. Some companies exceed expectations with major clinical milestones, strategic acquisitions, or partnerships. Others hit technical or financial roadblocks that slow their trajectory. And for many, they observed steady progress.
In this retrospective, we look back at the biotech companies we picked and assess where they stand today. Did we identify future winners? Or simply catch companies mid-journey? Let’s find out.
Table of contents
The winners: Companies that delivered
Some of our 2024 picks didn’t just progress; they exceeded expectations, and sometimes sooner than we thought. Indeed, less than a month after we highlighted it in our picks for 2024, Aiolos Bio, the company that launched with a $245 million series A round in 2023, was snapped up by GSK in January 2024 in a deal worth $1 billion upfront and up to $400 million in milestones. Its lead asset, AIO‑001, an extended‑half‑life anti‑TSLP antibody already phase 2 ready at the time of the deal, was immediately absorbed into GSK’s respiratory pipeline.
A couple of weeks ago, it was Capstan Therapeutics’ turn to attract acquisition interest, from AbbVie this time. After it successfully dosed its first phase 1 patients with its in vivo CAR‑T candidate, CPTX2309, in June 2025, AbbVie agreed to pay up to $2.1 billion for the biotech and its novel targeted lipid nanoparticle platform.
ReNAgade Therapeutics also delivered a strategic exit when Orna Therapeutics acquired its RNA delivery technology in mid‑2024. ReNAgade’s platform quickly proved its value in action: in January 2025, Vertex launched a $65 million upfront, with up to $1 billion milestone collaboration with Orna to power in vivo gene-editing therapies, including sickle cell and beta thalassemia, anchored in ReNAgade’s delivery tech.
Then there’s Maze Therapeutics, a quieter but equally strong success story. Though it didn’t attract acquisition headlines, Maze made meaningful strides: it completed an upsized IPO in February 2025, raising $140 million, launched two clinical-stage programs, phase 1/2 for APOL1 kidney disease and phase 1 for CKD/PKU, and turned a profit in 2024, boosted by licensing revenue from a Shionogi deal. With a cash runway into 2027 and growing clinical momentum, Maze is a quieter but still significant success.
The good students with solid progress
Not every company in our 2024 list raced toward billion-dollar deals or acquisitions, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stalled. Several have stayed firmly on track, advancing pipelines and strengthening their scientific and strategic foundations.
One example is Cellarity, which transitioned from platform development to the clinic with the start of its first human trial. In June 2025, the biotech company announced it had dosed its first healthy volunteer in a phase 1 trial of CLY‑124, an oral globin-switching therapy for sickle cell disease. Meanwhile, Cellarity’s partnership with Novo Nordisk expanded further, with a new program in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH).
Kriya Therapeutics also transitioned key programs into the clinic, including KRIYA‑825, a gene therapy for geographic atrophy, which entered phase 1/2 earlier in 2025. The company shared new preclinical and early clinical data at the ARVO and ASGCT conferences this year.
Quotient Therapeutics continues to refine its somatic genomics platform. While still in discovery, it secured a strategic collaboration under Flagship Pioneering and Pfizer’s joint initiative in August 2024 to apply its platform to cardiovascular and renal disease targets. This partnership offers an important external validation, even as clinical programs remain some way off.
OrsoBio, meanwhile, has made steady progress in metabolic disease. Its lead candidate, TLC‑6740, advanced through phase 1 trials, showing positive safety and metabolic signals in humans. The company also closed a $67 million series B round in September 2024.
Carisma Therapeutics, a biotech on a rockier road in 2025
Carisma’s journey reflects one of biotech’s toughest realities: scientific promise isn’t always enough to sustain a company. Despite a compelling macrophage-engineering platform and high-profile collaborations, Carisma’s path has been turbulent, now culminating in a strategic merger that redirects its future.
Throughout 2024, Carisma appeared to be progressing well. Its in vivo CAR‑M platform, in collaboration with Moderna, expanded to target both oncology and autoimmune indications. Preclinical data presented at SITC and AASLD demonstrated anti-tumor effects in solid tumors and fibrosis, respectively, building a narrative of scientific momentum and technical validation.
Despite this, the company lacked any near-term clinical catalysts. Its lead assets remained in preclinical stages, with no licensing revenues or late-stage trials to justify continued high burn rates. The Moderna collaboration, though it was very valuable research-wise, did not bring the financial security Carisma needed. Moderna’s collaboration was structured more as a research partnership than a licensing deal, generating substantial near-term revenue and the expansions involved research-stage milestones without significant upfront cash infusions.
In December 2024, the inevitable followed: Carisma announced a 34% workforce reduction, paused major research programs, notably CT-0525, and initiated a restructuring to preserve cash. By early 2025, operations were trimmed to a bare minimum, laying off 95% of the remaining workforce as the company actively weighed strategic options. That alternative path recently appeared: in June 2025, the biotech announced a merger agreement with OrthoCellix, a subsidiary of Ocugen.
This merger will pivot Carisma away from oncology and macrophage engineering, merging into a newly named OrthoCellix, focusing on NeoCart, a phase 3-ready cartilage repair therapy. The new company is intended to carry forward Carisma’s Nasdaq listing under a new ticker, while Carisma shareholders will become shareholders of the new entity. For that matter, Carisma’s shareholders initiated an investigation to find out whether the merger is fair to them and whether Carisma “breached its fiduciary duties to shareholders by failing to obtain the best possible consideration for Carisma shareholders.”
This merger is a dramatic shift: Carisma is effectively abandoning its original platform in exchange for a stake in a late-stage regenerative medicine company with a ready-made clinical asset. There is no doubt that Carisma’s shareholders and staff had better hopes for the company’s future, but this is an example of how challenging the biotech industry can be even when the science has been validated by peers.
Partnering 2030: Biopharma Report
