Cellares Co-Founders Omar Kurdi (President, left) and Fabian Gerlinghaus (CEO, right) with the company’s automated cell therapy manufacturing platform, the Cell Shuttle.
Cell therapies hold immense promise but, traditionally, carry a similarly large price tag often linked to complex, manual manufacturing. In its latest move to help make these life-saving and -enhancing treatments more scalable and potentially accessible, Cellares is partnering with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health to automate the clinical-scale manufacturing of UW-Madison’s novel CRISPR-edited GD2 CAR-T therapy. The goal is to accelerate this potential solid tumor treatment into clinical trials more swiftly.
The partnership specifically targets the manufacturing bottlenecks that can hinder therapies like UW-Madison’s CRISPR-edited GD2 CAR-T, designed for solid tumors such as neuroblastoma and melanoma. By leveraging Cellares’ Cell Shuttle™ platform – an integrated, automated system – the collaboration provides UW-Madison access to reproducible, clinical-scale production capabilities crucial for advancing their cutting-edge research from the lab bench towards essential human trials, bypassing traditional development delays.
Cellares Co-founder and CEO Fabian Gerlinghaus noted the difficulty in treating solid tumors and the limited options many patients face. This collaboration with UW-Madison, he explained in a press release, allows Cellares to help “remove the manufacturing barriers that can hinder promising research” like the university’s CRISPR-edited GD2 CAR-T product. By using the Cell Shuttle to automate and scale production, Gerlinghaus added, the company can significantly accelerate “the transition from academic innovation to investigational therapy,” ultimately bringing hope for new treatments.
Filed Under: Biologics, Cell & gene therapy, Industry 4.0, Oncology
