GSK, Cytiva, and Lonza are among 20 companies looking to develop technologies aimed at lowering the cost of cell and gene therapy production.

Over 20 companies have been brought together by the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult (CGT Catapult) to assess multiple process analytical technologies (PAT), which are new or frequently used in other sectors.

This is the first consortium of this scale with the 20 companies consisting of technology providers, therapy developers, charities, and pharmaceutical firms.

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The consortium has initially been setup for one year and it is anticipated to provide outputs by mid-2022.

PAT is necessary to enable monitoring and control during the manufacturing process. This helps reduce manufacturing costs, batch failures and helps push products towards commercialization.

“The collaborative model will facilitate the sharing of data from research carried out by members of the consortium to help the development of industry specific PAT,” Matthew Durdy, CEO of CGT Catapult told BioProcess Insider.

“This in turn will help reduce batch failures and manufacturing costs associated with the development and production of cell and gene therapies. Overall allowing accelerated development of these therapies and eventual commercialization.”

Each organization will “bring their individual area of expertise and technical competency ranging from product specific to commercial adoption,” said Durdy.

Additionally, the consortium will provide the organization’s with “industry specific knowledge” enabling them to add cell and gene therapy PAT to their service offerings.

In turn, the development of knowledge and understanding aims to reduce cost and investment risk to each organization and ultimately advance therapeutics in the cell and gene therapy sector.

CGT Catapult is established by non-departmental government body Innovate UK in 2017 to support the burgeoning sector. In March, GSK became the seventh collaborator to take residency at its Stevenage, UK facility.

The full list of organization’s that have formed the PAT consortium are: ABER Instruments; Anthony Nolan; BD; Bio-Techne; Cambridge Consultants; CGT Catapult; ChemoMetec; C-CIT Sensors; Cytiva; Eppendorf; GlaxoSmithKline (GSK); HORIBA; IMSPEX Diagnostics; Kaiser Optical Systems, an Endress+Hauser company; Lonza; Ocean Insight; Ori Biotech; Oxford Nanoimaging; Quantex; See-Through; TeloNostiX; Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies; Univercells Technologies.