Everyone keeps saying cell therapy is the future, and in theory, it is. You take a patient’s own cells, reprogram them to fight disease, and give them back. It is the most personal form of medicine we have. The problem is that biology does not concern itself with business plans.

• Novo Nordisk recently shut down its entire cell therapy division, cutting around 250 jobs after years of investment in type 1 diabetes and Parkinson’s programs. The decision was not about bad data. The science worked. The trouble began when science and production met. Each patient’s cells behave differently. Every batch demands its own handling. The process runs like a laboratory masquerading as a factory.
• Takeda reached a similar point, exiting cell therapy altogether and cutting roughly 137 research positions after realizing the complexity and cost of personalized manufacturing outweighed its near-term potential.
• Galapagos made the same call, winding down its cell therapy business, shedding approximately 365 jobs, and incurring a financial loss of up to €300 million through restructuring and write-downs. Together, these exits reveal a simple truth: the science is sound, but the systems built to deliver it are not yet in place.

That is the harsh reality of cell therapy. It works beautifully for one person at a time. Try to do it for a thousand, and the system begins to collapse under its own precision. The logistics are brutal: supply chains, cryogenic storage, transportation, quality control, and costs that spiral faster than optimism. Personalized medicine sounds poetic until you try to make it practical.

When Biology Refuses to Behave

We call it a scalability problem, but it is really a humility problem. We keep trying to make biology behave like engineering. We treat living systems as if they can be streamlined, automated, and standardized until they fit our expectations. Biology refuses. It is unpredictable, uneven, and deeply human. That is what makes it powerful in research and maddening in production.

There is a broader lesson here. Progress does not mean forcing life to fit our systems; it means adapting our systems to fit life. It means building systems that respect how life actually works. Not everything that succeeds in controlled conditions should be industrialized. That does not make the idea weak; it makes it real.

Maybe the next breakthrough in cell therapy will not come from scaling up, but from scaling wisely. Some treatments are best administered closer to the patient, rather than within a production line.

Biology has a way of reminding us who is in charge. The sooner we stop trying to make it convenient, the sooner we might actually make it work.

Beyond the Petri Dish

The real lesson from cell therapy is not that scaling is impossible, but that it demands reinvention. When the system breaks, it does not mean the idea was wrong. It means the infrastructure was outdated. Every obstacle forces us to rethink how we approach production, regulation, and access.

That is the quiet beauty of this field. It refuses to fit the old templates. Each challenge exposes what needs redesigning; not just in biotech, but in every industry that tries to translate complexity into scale. We are learning, again, that progress comes from pressure. It comes from refusing to accept that “too hard” means “not worth doing.”

So yes, cell therapy is hard to scale. But that is the point. It pushes us to create systems as sophisticated as the science itself. The future belongs to those willing to build what does not yet exist, instead of forcing the next revolution into the molds of the last one.