Boasting an outstanding safety record, lentiviral vectors (LVV) are key components in CAR-T cell therapy manufacturing. Unfortunately, owing to the lack of a robust and scalable production platform, therapy providers too often experience highly variable quality, inconsistent yields, and poor recoveries, leading to severe disruptions in the supply chain, said the partners.
By combining Cellares’ automation and robotics technology with iVexSol’s viral vector expertise, the two entities aim to develop consistent, high-quality solutions for viral vector manufacturing to improve access to this critical reagent.
iVexSol will supply Cellares with high-quality LVV to support the development of its automated, closed, end-to-end cell therapy manufacturing platform, the Cell Shuttle with an eye on leveraging that technology to automate the entire manufacturing process, including vector production.
In-built flexibility
While Cellares’ primary focus has always been cell therapy manufacturing, it said it intentionally developed its Cell Shuttle in a manner that provides flexibility in the processes and technologies that it can support. The platform can be easily adjusted to different customer processing needs and supports a variety of cell therapy modalities.
That company's CEO, Fabian Gerlinghaus, told BioPharma-Reporter: "Both Cellares and iVexSol are focused on creating access to cell therapies. In addition to the actual cell therapy manufacturing bottleneck, we also need to solve the viral vector manufacturing bottleneck. We're working with iVexSol to explore how our automated and flexible bioprocessing technologies can be leveraged to create optimized solutions for viral vector manufacturing. This is a natural fit for our technology since the flexibility to support different bioprocessing workflows has been a central pillar of our architecture from the beginning."
Financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed.
We spoke to Gerlinghaus back in May where he outlined why automation is key to making cell therapy manufacturing a viable industry.