Spotlight: Demonstrating the potential of a novel microfluidic platform to optimize and scale CAR-T manufacturing

The development and manufacturing of chimeric antigen receptor T cells (CAR-T) using established methods is resource intensive and logistically demanding. This showcase presentation will focus on demonstrating that miniaturization and parallelization of end-to-end CAR-T process development and manufacturing via a newly developed microfluidic technology platform offers a solution to these problems. The Lakhesys Benchtop Cell Therapy FactoryTM has been developed and tested to enable parallelized and automated cell therapy processing in an end-to-end fashion, i.e. from cellular starting material to the final drug product, thus covering all critical process steps. The Astraveus team will present latest experimental data to demonstrate the use of this technology platform in end-to-end CAR-T processing, enabling highly efficient cell selection and genetic modification through rapid mass transfer under low shear stress. In addition, the integration of an image-based cytometry module will be discussed. This module enables on-board control of critical process parameters and quality attributes such as cell viability, phenotype and transduction efficiency, thus potentially eliminating the need for off-line flow cytometry.

• Introduction of Astraveus and the Lakhesys Benchtop Cell FactoryTM to the European cell therapy community
• Demonstration of a novel End-to-End CAR-T process development and manufacturing approach based on microfluidic technology
• Delivering scientific proof points to enable order-of-magnitude improvements in manufacturing cost, patient access and CapEx investment related to cell therapies