Emanuel, Cellares share commitment to lowering cost of care with cell therapies
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, November 16th, 2021 – Cellares Corporation, a life sciences technology company pioneering a revolutionary automated approach to cell therapy manufacturing, today announced the appointment of Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, to its Board of Advisors. Emanuel is a bioethicist and currently Vice Provost for Global Initiatives, the Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor, and Co-Director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Emanuel is a leading voice on public health issues, especially overcoming barriers that prevent patients from getting the care they need. His guidance will be key as Cellares advances the Cell Shuttle, its end-to-end solution for scalable cell therapy manufacturing. The Cell Shuttle is an enclosed device that is entirely software-controlled for maximum flexibility while maintaining complete automation, allowing for high-throughput manufacturing that needs less space and fewer people to operate than existing workflows.
“Throughout health care, new technology has meant rising costs—not lower. Advances in cell therapy, while life saving, are no different: they have consistently meant higher costs,” said Emanuel. “What attracts me to Cellares is that the company is changing the paradigm not just for cell therapies, but for all of health care. It is demonstrating that technological innovation can lower health care costs. Their innovation will change all our assumptions on the limitations in drugs, biologics, and cell therapies. I’m excited to share in this mission, accelerating access to cell therapies for everyone by making them much more affordable to manufacture.”
Cellares is growing quickly as it works to smash industry bottlenecks, and last month appointed John Tomtishen as Vice President of Operations. In the past year, the company added three organizations to its Early Access Partnership Program (EAPP): PACT Pharma, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and most recently, Poseida Therapeutics.
Dr. Emanuel will join existing luminaries in the cell therapy field and experienced business leaders on the advisory board, including Carl June, MD, professor of immunotherapy, University of Pennsylvania; Tim Moore, president and chief operating officer, PACT Pharma; Megan Suhoski Davis, PhD., director, PDL, University of Pennsylvania; and Rodney Rietze, PhD, co-founder and CEO of viral vector manufacturer iVexSol Inc.
“Throughout his career, including as a policy advisor to multiple presidential administrations, Zeke has been dedicated to improving access to healthcare. And at Cellares, we’re perfectly aligned with this pressing need as we work to make life-saving therapies more accessible to patients,” says Fabian Gerlinghaus, CEO and co-founder of Cellares. “Cell therapy production today is labor-intensive, made with inefficient, time-consuming manual manufacturing workflows that are prone to human inconsistency, delay, and error. Compared with manual methods, the Cell Shuttle requires only 20% of the space and 25% of the human labor, which leads to a significant reduction in manufacturing costs — a key obstacle for patient access to cell therapies.”
About The Cell Shuttle
The Cell Shuttle is an automated and closed end-to-end manufacturing solution that is flexible and scalable, enabling customers to run the exact processes specified for their cell therapy. Compared with currently available cell therapy manufacturing methods, this next-generation platform enables a three-fold reduction in process failure rates and is capable of producing 10+ patient doses in parallel, which increases manufacturing scalability by an order of magnitude. This will reduce the per-patient manufacturing cost by up to 70 percent for most processes.
About Cellares Corporation
Cellares is creating the future of cell therapy manufacturing and accelerating access to life-saving cell therapies. The company is developing a one-of-a-kind solution to overcome the limitations associated with manufacturing cell therapies that are more affordable and widely available to patients in need. With Cellares’s proprietary platform—the Cell Shuttle—biopharma companies, academic research centers and CDMOs will no longer have to compromise by either choosing a manufacturing platform that is semi-automated but lacks workflow flexibility, or one that provides customization but not the end-to-end automation needed to manufacture at scale. The company is headquartered in South San Francisco, Calif. For more information visit www.cellares.com.
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