BrainChild opens a pivotal CAR-T trial for DIPG

BrainChild Bio said on 8 September 2026 that it had dosed into a pivotal trial for diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, a brainstem tumour of childhood that standard care can delay but not cure. The company closed a $116 million Series A the same day to pay for it.

The ILLUMINATE study, registered as NCT07680439, is an open-label, single-arm registrational Phase 2 running at six paediatric neuro-oncology centres in the United States. It enrols children and young adults with newly diagnosed DIPG after standard focal radiation.

What distinguishes BCB-276 is where it goes. Rather than infusing engineered T cells into a vein and hoping they cross into the brain, the therapy is delivered locoregionally into the cerebrospinal fluid through an indwelling reservoir and catheter — up to 15 doses, roughly every two weeks, over seven to eight months. The B7-H3-targeted construct comes out of Michael Jensen’s laboratory at Seattle Children’s, where the BrainChild-03 Phase 1 trial reported a manageable safety profile and encouraging survival in Nature Medicine.

The programme holds FDA Fast Track designation and is built for an accelerated biologics licence application.