Cellares and City of Hope announced a collaboration Jan. 8 to evaluate automated manufacturing for an investigational CAR T cell therapy. The effort will target glioblastoma multiforme, a fast-growing and aggressive brain cancer with limited treatment options.

The partnership aims to address long-standing manufacturing as well as quality control challenges that have slowed the development of CAR T therapies for solid tumors. It focuses on City of Hope’s IL13RA2-EGFR targeting CAR T cell program, known as CARpool.

The therapy is designed to treat glioblastoma, a disease with an estimated 300,000 new diagnoses worldwide each year.

City of Hope is a recognized leader in CAR T research for glioblastoma. It was also the first institution to administer CAR T cells directly into the brain via local tumor injection.

Under the agreement, City of Hope will evaluate Cellares’ Cell Shuttle automated manufacturing platform alongside its Cell Q automated quality control system. The goal is to enable reliable, high-throughput production and standardized quality control of CAR T therapies for solid tumors.

By engaging at the preclinical stage, the partners plan to establish scalable, reproducible manufacturing processes and analytics. They hope to accelerate the therapy’s progression into clinical trials – and, ultimately, to support global patient demand.

Expanding access

“Manual, fragmented manufacturing and quality control cannot meet the scale required for large solid tumor patient populations,” said Fabian Gerlinghaus, co-founder and CEO of Cellares. “By collaborating with City of Hope, we will remove these bottlenecks through automation, enabling reproducible manufacturing, lowering failure rates, and expanding patient access at commercial scale.”

Christine Brown is deputy director of the T Cell Therapeutics Research Laboratories at City of Hope. She noted glioblastoma remains one of the most challenging solid tumors to treat.

“Advancing CAR T therapies in this setting requires not only rigorous translational science but also high controlled and reproducible manufacturing,” said Brown. “We are excited to incorporate automation early in development to standardize processes and analytics, enabling the consistency required for effective clinical translation.”

The announcement comes on the heels of another recent one from Cellares that NJBIZ reported on. Under that agreement, Autolus Therapeutics will evaluate whether Cellares’ automated Cell Shuttle platform can support expanded commercial production of its U.S. Food & Drug Administration-approved CAR T therapy, Aucatzyl.

Cellares has a manufacturing facility in Bridgewater.