New System to Automate the Ex-Vivo Expansion of Autologous Cell Therapy

The new CellBase CT™ from The Automation Partnership will be introduced at the Cell & Gene Therapy Forum, in Washington, USA on January 24-26th, 2011.

The new CellBase CT system, which was developed in collaboration with leading cell therapy experts, can be used in a GMP facility for rapid scale up of existing manual cell culture processes in T-flasks. CellBase CT provides researchers with a fully-contained, aseptic cell expansion area where the risk of external contamination or internal cross-contamination has been eliminated. This enables scientists to manufacture multiple autologous cell therapies from many individual patients in parallel, making the CellBase CT a cost-effective alternative to labour intensive manual cell culture.

CellBase CT comes with a range of tools to support validation in a GMP regulated environment, and has been developed and extensively tested to enable clean, reproducible expansion of clinically applicable stem cells and other cell types.

Tim Ward, Director of Cell Culture at TAP explains: “By implementing CellBase CT during Phase II, cell therapy products can be tested alongside manually produced material so that phase III can be fully supported by the automated system. The simple scalability of the system means that the same process technology can be used throughout development and into production, reducing the high level of risk and cost associated with the need to prove equivalency following late stage process changes.”

Ward continues: “We are very excited to be premiering such a major advance at this year’s Cell & Gene Therapy Forum and look forward to meeting progressive scientists that want to discover how the CellBase CT could provide scalable and more affordable manufacturing of their autologous cell therapy products.”