Forge's Piteri-Molina: AI's gene therapy value is manufacturing data

Forge's position changed materially with the $620 million acquisition by Ajinomoto in late 2023, which Piteri-Molina credits with accelerating its commercial manufacturing ambitions. The headcount figures she cites—more than 425 employees now versus 327 as of July 2023—illustrate that build-out, and she says retention has stayed above 92%.

The broader backdrop she describes is a cell and gene therapy field that added three new blockbuster products last year: Bristol Myers Squibb's Breyanzi, Johnson & Johnson and Legend Biotech's Carvykti, and Sarepta Therapeutics' Elevidys. That brought the total number of blockbuster drugs in the space to five, per the Alliance of Regenerative Medicine. Piteri-Molina says she is seeing more programs advance through the clinical pathway than ever before, which is the context for her argument that manufacturing efficiency is the next constraint to address.

Her caution cuts in two directions. She draws a distinction between AI tools that tackle technical challenges and the proliferation of general bots, questioning whether the latter are the best use of resources in this space. She also warns against letting the case for domestic manufacturing narrow the industry's view, noting that rare disease patient populations are distributed globally rather than concentrated in any one country.