CAR-X
Cell Therapy
Collaborations, Mergers & Acquisitions
Point of Care

Strategic Collaboration Between Lonza and Cellpoint Set to Deliver Point-of-Care CAR-T

Phacilitate
24 June 2021
SHARE NOW

A new agreement between Lonza and CellPoint will reportedly seek to rapidly develop several T-cell therapies for point-of-care manufacturing, aiming to reduce vein-to-vein time for patients.

The announcement comes from CellPoint – a company developing point-of-care CAR-T therapeutics – that has stated the agreement will involve the use of Lonza’s Cocoon® Platform for clinical manufacturing of CellPoint’s CAR-T cell therapies at a faster rate and at a lower cost.

As Tol Trimborn, CEO of CellPoint explained:

“CellPoint’s T-cell therapies have enormous potential for treating various cancers. This agreement will allow us to accelerate our path to the clinic, treating more patients sooner, and help to solve the key issues facing CAR-T therapeutics. We are very pleased that our disruptive model and agile CAR-T development organization is backed by the most reliable partner in the industry, using the Cocoon® platform.”

Currently focused on the development of CAR-T immunotherapies for the treatment of multiple cancers, the company has reported difficulty with robustly manufacturing therapeutics, at-scale and in close proximity to patients.

The collaboration will use Lonza’s Cocoon® Platform in tandem with CellPoint’s xCellit platform in order to manage the workflow, online. All in all, the combination should reduce costs associated with manufacturing, circumvent complex logistics and reduce the time to treatment. CellPoint claims that vein-to-vein time could be lowered from an industry standard of over a month to as low as 5–7 days.

Eytan Abraham, Head of Lonza Personalised Medicine, added:

“We look forward to collaborating with CellPoint to enable and accelerate bringing novel cancer immunotherapies to the clinic and patients. Use of the Cocoon® Platform, coupled with the array of process development, manufacturing expertise and tools that Lonza brings to the bear, will help to accelerate the path to the clinic, and provide a smooth path to commercial approval. By leveraging the Cocoon’s unique platform capabilities, this collaboration aims to illustrate the promise and feasibility of manufacturing autologous immunotherapies at the point-of-care into approved routine use.”

The agreement will further leverage the skills and expertise from in process development from Lonza, as CellPoint will be responsible for site selection, technical operations, clinical development and regulatory approval of the CAR-T therapies.

Source: CellPoint press release (hosted via Lonza)