Cellular Origins has entered into a collaboration with Johnson & Johnson to develop a scalable, end-to-end automated platform for autologous CAR-T cell manufacturing.

Cellular Origins has successfully shown that its platform is able to fully automate cell therapy manufacturing processes using validated, off-the-shelf third-party instruments in combination with mobile robots and Cellular Origins’ proprietary sterile fluid transfer technology. As a next step, Cellular Origins is developing its first end-to-end, GMP-ready system for clinical manufacturing.

This news comes after J&J recently shared promising cell therapy clinical data. They announced the first data from a Phase 1b study for JNJ-90014496 (JNJ-4496), an investigational dual-targeting anti-CD19/CD20 bispecific autologous chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy. JNJ-4496 showed potential in treating patients with relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphoma (R/R LBCL) who haven’t been previously treated with CAR T-cell therapy. It also showed promise in treating R/R diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), the most common type of aggressive lymphoma.