Better Buy: Bellicum Pharmaceuticals, Inc. vs. bluebird bio

This version of our ongoing better buy series pits two development-stage biotechs, Bellicum Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: BLCM) and bluebird bio (NASDAQ: BLUE), against each other. The companies have something in common -- they're both developing chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapies to treat cancer -- but they've both got something else up their sleeves.

CAR-T technology and the related T cell receptor (TCR) technology both involve taking immune cells out of patients, inserting DNA that trains the immune cells to attack cancer cells expressing a certain protein, and then putting the cells back into the patient to do their work.

While both Bellicum Pharmaceuticals and Bluebird have therapies using CAR-T/TCR, they're not currently competing with each other directly because their respective CAR-T therapies train the immune cells against different targets expressed on different types of tumors.

Source: Fool.com