Mission Bio Joins NSF Cell Manufacturing Research Initiative to Advance Cell Therapy Development

Collaboration will enable members to leverage the Tapestri^® single-cell technology to streamline cell therapy development and manufacturing processes

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., March 28, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Mission Bio, the pioneer in high-throughput single-cell DNA and multi-omics analysis, has joined the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT), leveraging its Tapestri^® Platform to improve analytical assays and cell manufacturing processes. CMaT is a consortium of universities, companies, and clinical collaborators brought together to develop transformative tools and technologies for the consistent, scalable, and low-cost production of high-quality living therapeutic cells.

Launched in 2017, CMaT aims to revolutionize the treatment of cancer, heart disease, autoimmune diseases and other disorders by enabling broad use of potentially curative therapies that utilize living cells.

Consortium researchers will utilize Tapestri^®'s single-cell multi-omics capabilities to streamline and improve analytical assays that are crucial for assessing quality during various stages of the cell therapy development process. Tapestri^® can measure gene editing patterns at a high resolution, capturing the co-occurrence of on- and off-target edits, and the zygosity of edits, in individual cells that conventional bulk analyses cannot. This deeper characterization, which may have implications for safety and efficacy, can be completed within days and process thousands of cells at a time. Because Tapestri^® enables measurement of genotypic and immunophenotypic attributes at single-cell resolution, it will be particularly useful for early cell therapy development to validate cell engineering techniques. 

Tapestri^® will also be leveraged for improving and standardizing cell manufacturing processes, consolidating workflows measuring attributes like transduction efficiency and vector copy number that conventionally require weeks of clonal outgrowth and multiple assays to complete.

Mission Bio's multi-omic capabilities are especially valuable for assessing gene editing or gene transfer strategies in target cell populations or types.

"In light of clinical holds, safety concerns, need for better understanding of product quality, and improving workflow bottlenecks that can delay approval and delivery of novel cell therapies to patients, we are pleased to partner with Mission Bio. Together, we aim to improve the development of safe, efficacious, and rapid delivery of critical therapies through better drug product molecular characterization on the Tapestri^® Platform," said Krishnendu Roy, director of CMaT and Regents Professor and Robert A. Milton endowed in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

"We're proud to join this collaborative effort across various sectors to advance the field of cell therapy from within the community," said Anjali Pradhan, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at Mission Bio. "It's imperative we face these challenges in manufacturing scalability and reproducibility as a united front, so that we can deliver these potentially life-saving therapies to patients safely and more rapidly."

CMaT includes major university partners – Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez campus – as well as affiliate partners such as the University of Pennsylvania, Emory University, University of Oregon, and the Morgridge Institute for Research. Additional international academic partners from Canada, Ireland, and Japan, as well as industry and the U.S. national laboratories, are critical collaborators.

To learn more about Mission Bio and the Tapestri^® Platform, please visit missionbio.com.

About Mission Bio
Mission Bio is a life sciences company that accelerates discoveries and cures for a wide range of diseases by equipping researchers with the tools they need to better measure, characterize and predict our resistance and response to new therapies. Mission Bio's multi-omics approach improves time-to-market for new therapeutics, including innovative cell and gene therapies that provide new pathways to health. Founded in 2014, Mission Bio has secured investment from Novo Growth, Cota Capital, Agilent Technologies, Mayfield Fund, and others.

The company's Tapestri^® Platform gives researchers around the globe the power to interrogate genotype and immunophenotype together in individual cells, providing a comprehensive understanding of activity from a single sample. Tapestri^® is the only commercialized multi-omics platform capable of analyzing DNA and protein simultaneously at single-cell resolution. Tapestri^® is being utilized by customers at leading research centers, pharmaceutical, and diagnostics companies worldwide. A Tapestri^® assay recently entered GMP qualification and validation, indicating that single-cell analysis is on its way to routine use in clinical trials to support the next wave of life-saving CGT treatments.

Contact:
Will Walton
[email protected]

SOURCE Mission Bio