GC Therapeutics Advances Cell Programming with Systematic Discovery of Transcription Factor Combinations
New Data Published in Nature Communications Validates that TFome™ Platform Efficiently Generates Human Microglia-like Cells from Stem Cells in Just Days
Cambridge, Mass., June 10, 2025 - GC Therapeutics (GCTx), a biotechnology company with the mission to enable scalable, low-cost, and accessible human cell therapies for all patients, today announced a major advance in cell programming through the systematic, empirical exploration of transcription factor (TF) combinations to drive cell fates. Building on its landmark 2021 Nature Biotechnology publication, which introduced the first comprehensive screen of all annotated human transcription factors, this new work extends the TFome™ platform to identify multi-factor combinations, highlighting microglia as a potential cell program for future cell therapies. This work was published today in Nature Communications: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59596-3.
Unlike traditional approaches that rely on complex growth factor cocktails and media components, GCTx’s method directly activates the transcriptional regulators that define cell identity. By bypassing external signaling pathways, the TFome™ platform enables faster, more precise, and more reproducible differentiation through direct genetic instruction.
“We do not coax cells - we code them. That is how we are creating the playbook for cell therapy manufacturing - genetically programmed, radically faster, and orders of magnitude cheaper,” said Parastoo Khoshakhlagh, Ph.D., Co-Founder and CEO of GCTx and co-author on the publication. “Today cell therapy is a boutique treatment, and our mission is to make them a first-line medicine. By radically simplifying how we make cells, we are on our way to making cell therapies accessible to every patient who needs them.”
To demonstrate the platform, the research focused on microglia, brain-resident immune cells with essential roles in neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation. Current differentiation protocols are slow, variable, and often rely on co-culture with neurons. This approach identified a six-transcription-factor combination that produces microglia rapidly, efficiently, and without external media components.
“Our discovery platform is a compounding engine that drives our manufacturing innovation,” said Alex Ng, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of GCTx and a co-author on the publication. “Each screen expands our data foundation, allowing us to make more accurate predictions and re-use validated components. Every success gives us a launchpad for the next, reducing redundancy and accelerating delivery of high-quality cell programs.”
“We are not only reading cells, now we are precisely writing them - reshaping the framework for how any human cell can be engineered,” said George Church, Ph.D., Co-Founder of GCTx and Professor of Genetics. “The TFome™ lays the foundation for a programmable system - scalable across cell states, cell types, and tissues, tunable across contexts from regeneration to aging, and informed by the full depth of human biology. This opens up a new way to think about cell therapy: how it is built, how it works, and who it can reach.”
With this breakthrough, GCTx moves one step closer to its vision of programmable, industrialized cell manufacturing - bringing advanced cell therapies within reach for all patients.
About GC Therapeutics
GC Therapeutics (GCTx) is a biopharmaceutical company created to scale and unlock the next generation of cell therapy-based medicines. GCTx’s induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) programming platform, TFome™, integrates the latest advancements in synthetic biology, gene editing, cell engineering and machine learning to overcome the therapeutic development and scaling complexities associated with cell therapy and improve patient access across a broad range of disease areas. GCTx’s initial focus is on developing first-in-class and best-in-class cell therapies for gastrointestinal, neurological and immunological diseases. Founded in 2019, GCTx is based in Cambridge, MA and has raised $75 million to date from leading life sciences investors. For more information, please visit us at www.gc-tx.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X.