{"id":41541,"date":"2021-05-05T16:06:09","date_gmt":"2021-05-05T20:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sciencebusiness.technewslit.com\/?p=41541"},"modified":"2021-05-05T16:06:09","modified_gmt":"2021-05-05T20:06:09","slug":"cell-therapy-mfring-company-raises-82m-in-venture-funds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/technewslit.com\/sciencebusiness\/?p=41541","title":{"rendered":"Cell Therapy Mfring Company Raises $82M in Venture Funds"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"T-cells<\/a>
Killer T-cells surround a cancer cell (NICHD, Flickr)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

5 May 2021. A company developing an automated yet personalized manufacturing platform for cell therapies is raising $82 million in its second venture funding round. Cellares Corp.<\/a> in South San Francisco, California is a two year-old company creating a solution to boost the productivity of delivering engineered immune system cells to treat disease.<\/p>\n

Cellares Corp. aims to provide labs and health care providers with an end-to-end system that prepares and delivers immune system cells genetically altered to express therapeutic properties. An example is chimeric antigen receptors on T-cells or CAR T-cells<\/a>, that generate immune responses to treat blood-related and solid tumor cancers. Most current cell therapy production processes, says the company, are one-time procedures created ad hoc for each individual patient. As a result, these processes are often manual, labor-intensive, prone to errors, and can take weeks, making cell therapies difficult to complete for very sick patients.<\/p>\n

“There are more than 450,000 patients today who could potentially benefit from CAR T-cell therapies, a number expected to grow into the millions in a few years\u2019 time,” says Cellares’s co-founder and CEO Fabian Gerlinghaus<\/a> in a company statement<\/a>. “Less than 1% of these patients are able to get access to these therapies, due to a lack of scalable cell manufacturing technologies.”<\/p>\n

Self-contained lab with robotics and software<\/h4>\n

Cellares calls its solution a factory-in-a-box<\/a>, since the manufacturing process is contained in a single cartridge. The unit, says the company, takes in starting materials, such as a patient’s own T-cells, and carries out all of the steps in the cell manufacturing process: enrichment, isolation, activation, gene transfer, expansion, and formulation. The output is then given to the patient as an infusion therapy.<\/p>\n

Each of these gene therapy units, says Cellares, meets good manufacturing practices<\/a> for pharmaceuticals required by Food and Drug Administration. The units are arrayed in a self-contained lab with shared robotics and software that can support up to 10 simultaneous production processes. Cellares cites data showing its units result in a three-fold reduction in process failure risk, and up to 70 percent lower manufacturing costs from less manual labor and eliminating the need for separate clean-rooms. The result, says the company is a shorter time needed from collecting patients’ cells to delivering cell therapies, known as vein-to-vein time.<\/p>\n

Cellares Corp. is raising $82 million in its second venture funding round, led by Silicon Valley technology and life science venture capital companies Eclipse Ventures<\/a> and Decheng Capital<\/a>. Skyviews Life Science joined the round as a new investor with current investor 8VC. Eclipse Ventures also led Cellares Corp.’s first funding round, raising $18 million in October 2020, according to Crunchbase<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“With hundreds of new cell therapies already in development around the world,” adds Victor Tong<\/a>, Partner at Decheng Capital, “the as-yet untapped potential for a robust, automated manufacturing process is massive.”<\/p>\n

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