This audio is automatically generated. feedback.
Complex problems sometimes require practical solutions. Get on the waiting list When it comes to cell therapy, the industry is looking for new ways to deliver treatments faster and at a lower cost, and now a partnership between a cell engineering platform startup and a modular robotics manufacturer could help ease the burden of the bottleneck.
Drug delivery specialist company Portal Biotech and robot manufacturer Multiply Labs Partnership The goal is to create a “cartridge” for genetic engineering that combines cell disruption technology with an automated robotic laboratory.
Fred Parietti, CEO of Multiply Labs
Used with permission from Multiply Labs
Led by Portal Biotechnologies Former CEO of SQZ Biotech Armon Shaley, a PharmaVoice 100 honoree, boasts of his “mechanical disruption of cells” platform for getting cargo, such as genetic material, into cells. A precisely engineered silicone filter disrupts cells as it passes through. The technique is called mechanoporation. Other methods typically involve the delivery of viral vectors or electricityBoth have their drawbacks.
While Portal has simplified the cell therapy process, the technology currently requires manual intervention by highly trained workers, creating financial and time-sensitive challenges. This is where Multiply’s robotic solutions come in.
Multiply’s modular robotics system fits into a closet-sized box, housing 10 lab tasks, each with a robotic arm capable of precise complex tasks. Cell therapy manufacturing requires clean rooms and round-the-clock operations, but Multiply’s system could reduce costs by 70%, said CEO Fred Parietti. The company said 50% of manufacturing costs are “driven by labor costs and a shortage of skilled labor.” the study Parietti published it in March.
Multiply Labs’ modular system includes a robotic arm that performs precise programmed tasks within each cartridge.
Used with permission from Multiply Labs
“This is a perfect application for automation. It’s not sustainable to hire doctors and PhDs and try to manufacture it at scale,” Parietti said. “With this, you can basically build a sweatshop based on the most expensive, skilled labor you can imagine.”
For Sharei, automation is not just a convenient tool, it is the only way to make cell therapy viable within tight manufacturing constraints.
“We need to be able to automate cell therapy and not just impact the cell engineering stage itself, but streamline the upstream and downstream manufacturing of cell therapies,” Sharay said.
From custom-made to scalable
Taking a patient’s cells and processing them to fight disease is a complex process that requires six to 10 workers working in shifts in a clean room for days at a time, said Shaley, who predicts a new generation of cell therapies will emerge from less labor-intensive environments.
“Streamlining our processes allows us to significantly reduce our footprint,” Sharei says. “The work that Multiply is doing, coupled with the flexibility to program anything in a scalable way, allows us to amplify the impact of our next generation therapeutics.”
Cell therapy’s bottlenecks are surmountable, Sharay says, just as other new technologies have stumbled before they succeeded: Before recombinant DNA technology, for example, large molecules were difficult to make and administer.
“The invention of recombinant DNA technology suddenly gave us a simple, scalable way to make anything we wanted, and it’s underpinned a huge wave of biologics that have made a huge difference to people,” Sharay says. “Cell therapies are at a similar point, where they’re very bespoke and complicated to manufacture, and we can make that a lot easier.”
From a robotics manufacturing perspective, Parietti envisions a future where once-difficult processes become much easier.
“We’re moving from technologies that are made by hand to technologies that can be manufactured on an industrial scale,” Parietti says. “While some people argue that robots can do household chores, I think it’s much more interesting to apply those same technologies to develop and manufacture life-saving therapeutics.”
Platform Approach
Both Portal and Multiply act as platform makers that can provide services to companies that need solutions, such as cell engineering and robotics. Sharei came up with Portal’s business model from his experience with SQZ. SQZ was too focused on pursuing individual cures, instead of helping other biopharmaceutical companies pursue cures, Sharei said. SQZ, which once raised more than $100 million, All assets sold Earlier this year.
“When you go down the therapeutic path, your fate depends heavily on whether that lead treatment works. If there’s a problem, the whole platform could collapse,” Sharay said. “That’s why we like this platform business model.”
Multiply fits well into this model, integrating both platforms into one automated process to provide cell therapy manufacturers with a more complete overview of their manufacturing operations.
Armon Shaley, CEO of Portal Biotechnologies
Used with permission from Armon Sharei
“Cell therapy developers are comparing manual and robotic processes, so it’s exciting that Portal has given us a fascinating, non-viral strategy to edit these cells,” Parietti said. “Once we see that robots are comparable to manual processes but much more efficient, we’ll start to see them deployed in GMP, which is our ultimate goal.”
But operating as a platform company in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries can be tricky, Sharay said, because startups like portals tend to move at a different pace and with a different risk structure than big pharma.
“It’s a bit of a contradiction for them: on the one hand, they’re very keen on innovation and new things and love interacting with new grads, but they also tend to be very conservative,” said Sharay, who previously worked for pharmaceutical giant Roche. “It comes down to how flexible you are with your business model, because at the end of the day, they also want to make the world a better place, but they tend to get in their own way.”
Building an ecosystem of partners is an important step, Parietti said. Multiply is working with industry partners such as Thermo Fisher and Cytiva, as well as academic institutions such as the Stanford University School of Medicine and the University of California, San Francisco. Portal has also raised $5 million in pre-seed venture funding.
The companies plan to release commercial pilot applications next year. Multiply and Portal are talking to potential customers in big pharma, whom their CEOs won’t name for now, and the goal going forward is to keep the research gears turning in order to build the credibility needed to break into that industry.
