Aspen Neuroscience Announces Collaboration and License Agreement with Cell X Technologies

Companies will focus on automated manufacturing for scale out of autologous iPSC production

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 8, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Aspen Neuroscience has entered into a collaboration and license agreement with Cell X Technologies to advance Aspen's plans for automating the iPSC stage of its autologous manufacturing platform.

Aspen will leverage its established bioinformatics-based platform, and will lead all discovery, preclinical, development and commercialization activities associated with the advancement of automated manufacturing for its personalized cell therapy programs. Aspen paid an undisclosed amount to support the collaboration with Cell X on hardware and software to enable Aspen's automated GMP manufacturing process.

Cell X will lead efforts relating to the development of its automated intelligent cell processing platform, including Cx Suite™ and Colonyze™. The collaboration includes creating tools, methods and additions to the Celligent™ platform to support Aspen's autonomous manufacturing goals.

"This is a major step in our mission to develop and deliver personalized cell replacement therapies for people with unmet medical needs, starting with Parkinson's disease," said Kim Raineri, Chief Technology Officer of Aspen Neuroscience. "In order to treat greater numbers of patients with their own cells, Aspen is developing a robust, scalable, and automated biomanufacturing system. We have worked with the Celligent platform and believe that, combined with our bioinformatics and other enabling technologies, it has the potential to successfully automate iPSC production."  

Aspen's autologous manufacturing platform starts with a small sample of the patient's own skin cells, which are then reprogrammed to iPSCs unique to each patient, before differentiation into their final cell type for therapeutic delivery. For ANPD001, currently under investigation in a Phase 1/2a human clinical trial, the patient's iPSCs are converted into personalized dopaminergic neuronal precursor cells (DANPCs) for the treatment of Parkinson's Disease (PD).

Before being implanted, these cells are evaluated at every stage of the manufacturing process by Aspen's proprietary genomics platform, which includes several machine learning based genetic tests to evaluate cell quality.

"Our visionary team, the best in the world at creating and characterizing iPSCs, has enhanced throughput and performance of our manufacturing platform with automation, machine learning, and innovative technology operation solutions," said Damien McDevitt, PhD, president and CEO of Aspen Neuroscience. "Aspen is leading the way in addressing the autologous industry's historical challenges."

In the autologous manufacturing field, iPSC generation has historically been labor intensive. Aspen and Cell X have worked together to ensure that iPS cells manufactured utilizing the Celligent platform are highly comparable to control cell lines (from the same patient) made using Aspen's current process.

"The Celligent platform provides gentle and precise positive and negative cell selection that uses machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) computer vision algorithms trained by experienced subject matter experts to first automate cell processing workflows and to achieve adaptive process control," said Cell X President and CEO Lynne Frick. "We are excited to be working with the leading autologous cell platform company to advance the field in scaling iPSC production."

About Aspen Neuroscience
Headquartered in San Diego, Aspen Neuroscience, Inc. is a clinical development-stage, private company focused on autologous regenerative medicine. The company's patient-derived platform is used to create personalized cell therapies to address diseases with high unmet medical needs, beginning with autologous neuron replacement for PD. For more information and important updates, please visit https://www.aspenneuroscience.com.

About Cell X Technologies

Cell X Technologies, headquartered in Cleveland with applications labs in greater Boston, is revolutionizing cell processing. At the core of this revolution lies the transformative Celligent™ platform – a novel combination of robotics, imaging, and artificial intelligence that enables innovators to develop consistent, reproducible, and scalable GMP-compliant processes. Through this unique fusion of cutting-edge technologies, Cell X has unlocked the ability to commercialize autologous and allogeneic cell therapies, as well as explore tissue engineering and artificial organ applications.  www.cellxtechnologies.com

SOURCE Aspen Neuroscience, Inc.