Bristol Myers taps startup to boost cell therapy production
Dive Brief:
Bristol Myers Squibb is turning to a manufacturing startup to help produce cancer cell therapies faster, announcing Monday a partnership with the South San Francisco, California-based Cellares.
The deal, which reserves Cellares’ production capacity for Bristol Myers’ use, is worth up to $380 million in upfront and milestone payments. Cellares will handle technology transfer of certain Bristol Myers cell therapies to its automated manufacturing platform, dubbed the Cell Shuttle.
Bristol Myers currently sells two so-called CAR-T cell therapies, Breyanzi for lymphoma and Abecma for multiple myeloma, and has several others in development. In a statement, Lynelle Hoch, head of the pharmaceutical company’s cell therapy unit, said the Cellares deal would help it meet demand for CAR-T therapies “now and in the future.”
Dive Insight:
CAR-T therapies are personalized treatments made from patients’ own immune cells. Their production is precisely choreographed, as frozen cells are brought to manufacturing hubs where they are engineered and expanded into a cancer-seeking drug product. It’s laborious, time-consuming and costly.
Currently, CAR-T manufacturers need somewhere between two to three weeks to turn around a therapy for use in treating a patient. Companies like Cellares aim to improve on that standard through a variety of methods, among them automating production and moving manufacturing closer to treatment sites.
Cellares’ chief solution is along the lines of the former. The startup, which has raised more than $350 million from a group of investors that includes Bristol Myers, pitches its Cell Shuttle platform as both cheaper and more efficient than existing processes.
Resembling a sort of giant MRI machine, the Cell Shuttle is a miniature factory, housing all the technologies needed to make a CAR-T drug dose. Cellares claims it can reduce manufacturing failure rates, require drastically less labor and shave 50% off of average production costs.
The startup will dedicate multiple Cell Shuttles and associated quality control systems for Bristol Myers under the partnership. The shuttles will be housed in facilities located in the U.S., Europe and Japan, the companies said. Cellares’ current commercial-scale facility is in New Jersey.
In an email, a spokesperson for Cellares also noted the deal “strengthens Cellares’ position as a U.S. manufacturer” at a time when Congress is considering legislation that could restrict U.S. drugmakers from working with Chinese biotechnology companies like WuXi Apptec.
“This agreement with Bristol Myers Squibb is aligned with our strategy of establishing a global network of high-throughput, automated Smart Factories to meet the growing and worldwide demand for cell therapies,” said Fabian Gerlinghaus, Cellares’ CEO and co-founder, in a statement.
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