CTMC partners with Ori Bio to advance cell therapy processes

National Resilience and MD Cancer Center joint venture CTMC will be granted precommercial access to Ori Biotech’s paperless technology platform.

The Cell Therapy Manufacturing Center (CTMC) will be part of Ori’s LightSpeed Early Access Program (LEAP) as it looks to accelerate process development, commercialization, and clinical implementation of cell therapies.

Both parties have outlined numerous key objectives for the collaboration. The CTMC will assess its current CAR-T processes already ongoing in its development space onto Ori’s platform to highlight technical feasibility.

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Additionally, CTMC said it will carry-out manufacturing comparability tasks to showcase successful process transfer and data to compare to existing inhouse manufacturing processes.

The CTMC launched in June 2022. Its manufacturing capabilities and a cell therapy invented by Sattva Neelapu, professor of lymphoma/myeloma at MD Anderson, will be combined with Ori’s paperless technology platform.

“Ori and CTMC have specifically partnered with the goal of increasing patient access to potentially life-saving cell therapies. This partnership will have a considerable impact on the cell therapy field by implementing innovative, digitally enabled process discovery and automated manufacturing solutions,” said Jason Foster, CEO at Ori Biotech.

Paperless process

At Advanced Therapies week, Miami in January 2022 Foster told BioProcess Insider that paper is the enemy of scale and said that the firm has designed the platform to “take people out of the process where they’re not necessary, eliminate waste, and reduce costs [by] eliminat[ing] paper from the system.”

Furthermore, Foster said the LEAP program enables Ori to use feedback from customers from the very beginning about their needs and what they want to ensure they have an adaptable and dynamic product before they commercially launch.

At Advanced Therapies Europe, London lats month, Jason Jones, chief business officer at Ori, told us that the firm expects the platform to begin its marketing launch in 2023 and then enter market launch and supply in 2024.

“With that in mind, we are working with a small number of early access partners, in our Lightspeed programme, to be released before.”

While Jones could not disclose at the time who the partners are, he did say that Ori has a “number of others as well and that a lot of the partner work in terms of taking their processes, translating them onto our platform, and showing them against current processes is what will be done” at its recently opened facility Princeton, New Jersey.