Cellares, TScan Partner to Automate Manufacture of TCR-T Candidate

Cellares and TScan Therapeutics, Inc. have entered an agreement to evaluate automated clinical manufacturing of TSC-101, TScan’s lead TCR-T therapy candidate for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), through a comprehensive technical and operational assessment of Cellares’ automated manufacturing and testing platforms. 

TSC-101 is designed to treat residual disease and prevent relapse in patients with AML and MDS undergoing allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (allo-HCT). The therapy candidate uses a gene modification approach to engineer T cells from a healthy donor into a patient-specific cell therapy product. As TScan advances TSC-101 towards a pivotal trial, which is expected to begin in 2Q026, the company is evaluating Cellares’ automated manufacturing platform as a scalable and economical path to future commercial demand.

Under the agreement, Cellares will automate the TSC-101 manufacturing and testing processes on the Cell Shuttle, its end-to-end manufacturing platform, and the Cell Q, its automated quality control and release testing system. These closed-system, fully automated workflows are designed to reduce process variability, minimize labor intensity, and enable consistent execution across runs and geographies.

“As we prepare for the initiation of our pivotal study of TSC-101 this quarter, we are increasing our efforts for commercial readiness. Establishing a scalable and cost-efficient manufacturing strategy is a critical component. Cellares’ fully automated Cell Shuttle platform represents a promising approach to automating and scaling cell therapy production, with the potential to reduce manual processes and eliminate capacity constraints,” said Ray Lockard, M.B.A., Chief Manufacturing and Quality Officer of TScan Therapeutics. “Through this evaluation, we aim to determine how this technology could strengthen our long-term manufacturing network and support broader patient access, supporting our goal of delivering transformative therapies to patients as efficiently and reliably as possible.” 

“Patients with AML or MDS who remain at risk of relapse following transplant represent exactly the kind of underserved population that automated manufacturing was designed to reach,” said Fabian Gerlinghaus, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cellares. “Bringing automation to a late-stage program like TSC-101, with its healthy donor-derived but patient-specific manufacturing model, is the kind of challenge the Cell Shuttle and Cell Q were built for, and we believe it represents the manufacturing economics any developer will need to reach a population of this scale.”