CTMC partners with ScaleReady to tackle manufacturing barriers
According to both companies, the partnership is aimed at reducing the manufacturing barriers holding back cell and gene therapies from reaching more patients by integrating cutting-edge automation tools.
The agreement will enable CTMC to scale its recently completed GMP facility to drive high-throughput manufacturing utilizing the automated, closed system capabilities of the Fresenius Kabi Lovo(R) and Cue(R) cell processing systems.
Laine Linden, head of CTMC technical operations, said: “CTMC sees tremendous value in using products with a solid track record of clinical and commercially approved cell therapy successes. ScaleReady’s expertise and platform access will help us to leverage innovative technologies, like the Lovo, for our cell therapy process.”
“With the addition of the Fresenius Kabi Cue to our manufacturing platform, we hope to drive down variability and increase the number of patients we can successfully treat by automating and closing the final fill and finish steps of our cell therapy products.”
Josh Ludwig, global commercial director at ScaleReady, added: “We are honored to partner with CTMC and support their work to commercialize therapies from some of the world's leading cancer experts. By providing this state-of-the-art facility and their technical experts with the Cue system, we can functionally close the critical final fill and finish steps, which have historically been manual and open processes.”
“This leading-edge technology brings a new level of automation and scalability. Our expanded partnership with CTMC will significantly impact not only the research and the organization but also the patients in need of life-saving therapies.”
The news comes after ScaleReady recently partnered with Cellular Origins, a provider of automated manufacturing solutions for cell and gene therapies, back in May this year.
At Advanced Therapies 2023, Jenny Stjernberg, commercial director at ScaleReady, told BioPharma Reporter that the collaboration was “very important” to the wider industry.
“Over the past 10 years, the sector has been talking a lot about the need for automation and how we can automate to enable more patients to get treated. However, the automation that the industry initially thought was the right answer has proven to be misguided.”
“We ended up with very complex systems for manufacturing cells that take up a lot of space, expensive to run and are very complicated. With Cellular Origins, we are removing those complexities to ensure that we can multiply and scale through automation. So we are excited to see how we can, still with a very small footprint, be able to automate and treat a lot of patients.”
The first project under this partnership involved standardising and automating interconnections between the modules of ScaleReady’s G-Rex manufacturing platform, used by therapy developers to produce CGTs for clinical trials
