Fan Xiaohu's Wandao Cell closed a 140 million yuan Series A and showed first human data in DLBCL (diffuse large B cell lymphoma, the most common aggressive non Hodgkin lymphoma) at ASCO 2026 (the American Society of Clinical Oncology's annual
When China's Supreme Court cleared Fan Xiaohu of every trade-secret claim brought by GenScript at the end of 2025, the legal record was the easy part (Sina Finance reporting on the appeal). The harder argument is what he has spent the year since building: a universal CAR-T platform that skips gene editing entirely, financed by a 140 million yuan Series A, and now backed by the first human data in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) his Shenzhen-based Wandao Cell presented at the ASCO 2026 annual meeting.
Cilta-cel, the BCMA-directed autologous CAR-T Fan helped originate at Legend Biotech, has become the only CAR-T approaching two billion dollars in annual sales globally, according to Fierce Biotech's profile of his ASCO return. The economic ceiling sits underneath that commercial peak: in China, autologous CAR-T still ships at roughly one million yuan per dose, a price point 36kr's profile of Fan calls the "million-yuan anticancer needle." Universal, or off-the-shelf, CAR-T has been the proposed answer for years, but most clinical-stage programs still rely on CRISPR- or TALEN-based gene editing to make donor T cells safe and invisible to the host. Wandao's platform is positioned as non-gene-edited allogeneic, which is to say the manufacturing route is selection and expansion rather than knock-out engineering. Fan's bet is that the manufacturing route, not the underlying biology, is what keeps CAR-T expensive.
Six internal project initiation reports that GenScript alleged Fan forwarded to a personal email during Legend's 2017 founding sat at the center of the trade-secret case, according to PharnexCloud's legal analysis of the court record. The case also alleged inaccurate financial disclosures. China's highest court rejected all of GenScript's claims in a final ruling reported at the end of 2025 by QQ News and Sina Finance. The legal win was more than a personal vindication. It was the precondition for the financing that followed, and it removed the cloud that had hung over Fan's IP position since he left Legend within a month of cilta-cel's FDA approval in 2022.
Wandao Cell's 140 million yuan Series A was led by Songhe Capital with Orient Fuhai participating, according to 36kr's profile of Fan and the company. The round followed a 10 million US dollar angel. Fan told 36kr he had deliberately run a low-profile operation, declining pitches from several top-tier investors. The disclosure is itself part of the story: a CAR-T founder exiting Legend at cilta-cel's peak, fighting a four-year legal battle, and choosing to scale slowly rather than chase the highest-bidder syndicate.
Allogeneic CAR-T programs from Allogene, CRISPR Therapeutics' CTX112, and Caribou's CB-010 are advancing in the clinic, and Chinese academic and incubator programs have piled into the same space. The technical question is whether Fan's manufacturing-route bet holds against that field. The pivot to allogeneic and in vivo routes is widely described as a response to autologous's economic ceiling; Zamann Pharma's ASCO 2026 coverage reads the shift as a broader GMP and scale transition across CAR-T. Wandao calls its platform "non-gene-edited" to mark distance from the editing arms race, not from the universal CAR-T field. The platform leans on cell-selection and expansion steps to produce a universal product, which Fan argues is what makes industrial-scale, biologic-like cost feasible. His own stated target, per the 36kr interview, is production costs approaching those of a conventional biologic, a founder-level ambition that has not yet been independently benchmarked against the allogeneic field.
The Wandao abstract for the ASCO 2026 DLBCL data confirms the platform and the cohort, but the full efficacy and safety numbers (objective response rate, CRS rate, persistence) are not in the public abstract, and the company has not yet released a detailed readout. The next data drop, including the full ASCO presentation and the first multi-center trial, will tell readers whether Fan's manufacturing bet is a real answer to the field's economics or a third way that turns out to be harder than it looks.