CAR-T is often told as an American academic-to-pharma story - Penn to Novartis, the Kite and Juno acquisitions. The 2023 patent facet shows a field that had already gone global, with Chinese developers holding a meaningful share of new grants.
Aggregate the 2023 CAR-T grants by assignee and the breadth is clear: Gilead Sciences leads the facet (the Kite portfolio), with the University of Pennsylvania, Novartis, Juno Therapeutics, and Memorial Sloan Kettering on the U.S. academic-pharma side, and Nanjing Legend Biotech (US11564945B2), Shanghai Longyao (US11590168B2), and others representing a strong Chinese cohort.
The CPC clustering is tight around the construct and the therapy: C07K 14/7051 (CAR / T-cell-receptor components), A61K 35/17 (T-cell therapy), A61P 35/00 (antineoplastic), C07K 2319/03 (the costimulatory/signaling fusions), C12N 5/0636 (T-cell culture). The same classes recur across owners because everyone is claiming variations on the same modular receptor.
The strategic implication is jurisdictional. A globally distributed estate means freedom-to-operate is not a single-country question - a construct cleared against U.S. academic claims may still face grants held by developers filing primarily in China and elsewhere. The modular construct design multiplies the number of distinct claims, and the global ownership multiplies the jurisdictions in which they must be cleared.
For a portfolio strategist, the 2023 map argues against treating CAR-T as a settled, license-from-Penn-and-go field. The receptor's modularity invites continuous new construct claims, the ownership is international, and the antigen targets (BCMA, CD19, and beyond) each carry their own sub-estates. Mapping it means aggregating by assignee, by construct, by antigen, and by jurisdiction before drawing any freedom-to-operate conclusion.