Cellares to tackle key roadblock in cell therapy manufacturing with new partner iVexSol

Viral vector manufacturing and transduction processes today are lengthy and inconsistent

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO and LEXINGTON, Mass., Sept. 20, 2022 /PRNewswire/ --- Cellares Corporation, a life science technology company leading the way in cell therapy manufacturing automation, and iVexSol Inc., a company developing transformative viral vector manufacturing capabilities, today announced a strategic partnership to solve key challenges with viral vector manufacturing in order to accelerate access to life-saving therapies.

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.

By combining Cellares' automation and robotics technology with iVexSol's viral vector expertise, the partners aim to develop consistent, high-quality solutions for viral vector manufacturing to improve access to this critical reagent. 

"We are excited to be able to supply Cellares with high-quality LVV to support the development of their Cell Shuttle program, with an eye on leveraging this technology to automate the entire manufacturing process, including vector production," said iVexSol co-founder and CEO Rodney Rietze.

Cellares' automated, closed, end-to-end cell therapy manufacturing platform, the Cell Shuttle, can be easily adjusted to different customer processing needs and supports a variety of cell therapy modalities.  "While our primary focus has always been cell therapy manufacturing, we intentionally developed the Cell Shuttle in a manner that provides flexibility in the processes and technologies that it can support," said Cellares' co-founder and CEO, Fabian Gerlinghaus. "We are thrilled by the opportunity to partner with the iVexSol team to broaden our capabilities while leveraging their tremendous expertise in viral vector manufacturing."

Financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed.

The Cell Shuttle is an automated and closed end-to-end manufacturing solution that is flexible and scalable, enabling customers to run the exact processes specified for their cell therapy while meeting commercial-scale patient demand.  Compared with currently available cell therapy manufacturing methods, this next-generation platform enables a four-fold reduction in process failure rates and is capable of producing 16+ patient doses in parallel, which increases manufacturing scalability by an order of magnitude. This will reduce the per-patient manufacturing cost by up to 60 percent for most processes.

Cellares is creating the future of cell therapy manufacturing and accelerating access to life-saving cell therapies. The company is developing a one-of-a-kind solution to overcome the limitations associated with manufacturing cell therapies that are more affordable and widely available to patients in need. With Cellares' proprietary platform—the Cell Shuttle—biopharma companies, academic research centers, and CDMOs will no longer have to compromise by either choosing a manufacturing platform that is semi-automated but lacks workflow flexibility, or one that provides customization but not the end-to-end automation needed to manufacture at scale. The company is headquartered in South San Francisco, Calif.

iVexSol, Inc. is a viral vector manufacturing company founded on a proprietary, next-generation, stable lentiviral vector production process that transforms the way these essential gene-delivery vehicles are made. Our Intelligent Manufacturing™ platform ensures the robust and reliable production of high quality, high-titer vector by generating a clonally derived Master Cell Bank of stable vector-producing cells for the production of your gene of interest. Expansion, harvest and release of a vial from your bank enables us to deliver ready-to-use vector "on demand (i.e., within weeks, not months of your order), preserving and accelerating your clinical development timeline.

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SOURCE Cellares