Cellular Origins nabs separate manufacturing collaborations with J&J and Thermo Fisher
On the heels of last week’s teaming with Thermo Fisher Scientific, Cellular Origins has announced a collaboration with Johnson & Johnson to develop a scalable, end-to-end automated platform for autologous CAR-T cell manufacturing.
“Cellular Origins has successfully shown that its platform is able to fully automate cell therapy manufacturing processes using validated, off-the-shelf third-party instruments in combination with mobile robots and Cellular Origins’ proprietary sterile fluid transfer technology,” according to the announcement. “As a next step, Cellular Origins is developing its first end-to-end, GMP-ready system for clinical manufacturing.”
The partnership with J&J follows the biopharma company’s release earlier this month of promising data from a Phase 1b study for JNJ-90014496 (JNJ-4496), an investigational dual-targeting anti-CD19/CD20 bispecific autologous chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy. JNJ-4496 showed potential in treating patients with relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphoma (R/R LBCL) who haven’t been previously treated with CAR T-cell therapy.
In a separate announcement last week, Cellular Origins said it is collaborating with Thermo Fisher to deliver fully automated, robotic manufacture of cell and gene therapies (CGTs). The companies will combine Thermo Fisher’s cell culture and processing technology with Cellular Origins’ CGT robotic manufacturing platform, Constellation.
Cellular Origins said the first customer installation of a robotically operated Constellation platform with the integration of Thermo Scientific Heracell VIOS AxD CO2 incubator technology has now been completed at the Digital and Automation Testbeds in the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult’s Stevenage Manufacturing Innovation Centre, Stevenage, U.K., with extensive validation and testing to follow.
“Both companies aim to achieve the largest production output of CGTs per square meter of manufacturing space, as well as the lowest labor requirements currently available within a digitally integrated framework,” according to the announcement.