The World Health Organization has released its first-ever guidelines on childhood and adolescent obesity, a condition that affected 170 million people aged 5–19 in 2024 — a fourfold rise in prevalence since 1990, from 2% to 8% of that age group. The same week, Caribou Biosciences, the CRISPR company founded from Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna's lab, announced it is shutting down after failing to raise money for a Phase 3 trial of its off-the-shelf CAR-T therapy.

What do the WHO guidelines actually recommend?

The numbers behind the guideline are stark. Of the 170 million young people living with obesity in 2024, 70 million are children aged 5 to 9 and 100 million are adolescents aged 10 to 19, Health Policy Watch reports.

The recommendations draw a hard line by age:

• Ages 0–9: WHO does not recommend pharmacological treatment, bariatric surgery, or weight loss devices.
• Ages 10–19: Approved drugs may be considered only after a supervised multimodal lifestyle program has failed to achieve desired results.

For R&D managers at companies developing GLP-1 agonists and other weight-loss therapeutics, the guidelines effectively wall off the youngest patient population and position pharmacotherapy for adolescents as a second-line option. That framing matters for portfolio decisions: pediatric obesity drug programs targeting the under-10 cohort now face an explicit global public-health recommendation against their use, which will shape regulatory conversations, payer coverage debates, and trial enrollment ethics reviews worldwide.

Why is Caribou Biosciences shutting down?

Caribou Biosciences will wind down operations and discontinue clinical development of its two CRISPR-based CAR-T therapies, including vispa-cel, its off-the-shelf treatment for advanced B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma, STAT reports.

The collapse is not a scientific failure, at least not by the evidence available. Over the past year, Caribou worked successfully with the FDA to finalize the design of a Phase 3 trial for the therapy. The company could not, however, raise the capital needed to pay for the study.

The company's provenance makes the shutdown notable for anyone tracking the CRISPR field. Caribou was born from the research lab of Jennifer Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of CRISPR gene editing. That a company with direct lineage to one of the technology's inventors, an FDA-agreed Phase 3 design, and an active clinical program in a validated indication could not secure late-stage financing signals how unforgiving the current biotech capital environment remains for cell therapy developers.

What does this mean for the sector?

For allogeneic CAR-T programs specifically, Caribou's exit removes one of the longer-running contenders in the off-the-shelf lymphoma race, while leaving open the question of whether the field's remaining players can finance their own pivotal studies.

For pediatric obesity, the WHO document sets a benchmark that drug developers, regulators, and clinicians will reference for years. The exclusion of children under 10 from pharmacological intervention, and the lifestyle-first requirement for adolescents, effectively defines the addressable pediatric market for GLP-1 makers and constrains how trials in young adolescents can be designed and justified.

Whether follow-on WHO implementation guidance and national regulators align with these age thresholds — and whether financiers return to late-stage cell therapy before more companies hit the same funding wall — will shape both fields through the coming year.