Cellares and Poseida Therapeutics Partner to Accelerate Cell Therapy Manufacturing

Cellares, a life sciences technology company specializing in developing automated cell therapy manufacturing, announced on July 14, 2021 that Poseida Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company specializing in proprietary genetic engineering platform technologies to create cell and gene therapies, has joined Cellares’ Early Access Partnership Program (EAPP).

The addition of Poseida marks the third organization to participate in the EAPP, following industry partner PACT Pharma and academic partner Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Cellares initiated the EAPP in 2020 to provide participants with visibility and early access to its next generation cell therapy manufacturing platform, Cell Shuttle, meant to enable closed, automated, and scalable production of cell therapies.

Poseida’s participation is expected to help advance the manufacturing platform’s development, range of use, and applicability through insight and experience with respect to manufacturing workflows for a variety of autologous and allogeneic cell therapies. Poseida will evaluate the Cell Shuttle prototypes and provide data and written feedback relevant to its function and performance. This evaluation will include user studies that assess the Cell Shuttle’s hardware and software, product requirements, release criteria, and process workflows to help ensure product–market fit.

Poseida currently has two autologous chimeric antigen T cell (CAR-T) product candidates in clinical development, including P-BCMA-101, for patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma, and P-PSMA-101, for patients with metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer. The company also has off-the-shelf versions of both therapies in development and is exploring T-cell receptor T cell (TCR-T), anti-c-kit CAR-T, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), and genetically modified hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and natural killer (NK) cells.

“We’re thrilled to have Poseida Therapeutics on board to help broaden the possibilities for our Cell Shuttle platform,” said Cellares co-founder and CEO Fabian Gerlinghaus in a company press release. “Poseida’s tremendous expertise in the cell therapy space, especially spanning a diverse range of therapeutic modalities, is a huge boon to our developmental efforts. We anticipate our work with Poseida to demonstrate the Cell Shuttle’s adaptability for multiple cell therapy modalities, particularly CAR-T cells.”

“The flexibility of the Cell Shuttle matches the breadth of approaches we are developing at Poseida,” said Kerry Ingalls, chief operating officer at Poseida, in the press release. “To work across our cell therapy portfolio, an automated manufacturing system should be capable of reliably producing a range of therapies autologous and allogeneic CAR-T and in both solid and hematological cancers, for research and at scale for clinical trials and, ultimately, commercial applications. By joining forces with Cellares, we believe we can leverage the Cell Shuttle’s capabilities to help support our overall manufacturing strategy, further advancing cell therapy manufacturing.”

Source: Cellares