Cellular Biomedicine Group (CBMG) has announced its plan to configure part of its facility in Shanghai with GE Healthcare’s FlexFactory platform, which will be designed to speed up manufacturing timelines for its cell therapy clinical trials and commercial launch.

GE Healthcare developed FlexFactory for cell therapy, ascalable, semi-automated end-to-end platform. From start to finish, the process of getting a lab ready for optimized industrial-scale manufacturing would typically take a cell therapy manufacturer over 18 months to complete. FlexFactory can reduce this time by up to 50 percent, getting a company ready to manufacture at scale nine months faster, ultimately accelerating time to market and enabling clinicians to deliver therapies to patients sooner. 

Following the execution of this non-binding letter of intent (LOI), CBMG will become the first company to install GE’s FlexFactory for cell therapy, and anticipates that the FlexFactory will be operational in the CBMG-GE Joint Laboratory of Cell Therapy by the end of 2018.

“This is a productivity revolution in the CAR-T space – this new generation of semi-automated and standardized CAR-T manufacturing capabilities created by GE Healthcare and CBMG may allow cell therapy to provide an optimal platform and opportunity for general oncology patients. This long-term collaboration with GE could help us utilize digital technology, semi-automation and analytics, in an effort to reduce overall costs, and deliver treatments to patients more efficiently,” said Tony (Bizuo) Liu, chief executive officer of CBMG.

GE Healthcare’s FlexFactory solution will support CBMG by providing process development and training services, cell processing equipment, semi-automation capabilities, and digital connectivity solutions – all of which support current good manufacturing practices (cGMP)-compliant manufacturing. CBMG plans to use its FlexFactory to speed up its timelines for commercializing its CAR T-cell therapies, targeting various blood and solid tumor cancers. 

Through its collaboration with the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine (CCRM), a leader in developing and commercializing regenerative medicine technologies and cell and gene therapies, GE Healthcare is providing CBMG with process development services. The combined GE and CCRM process development team is comprised of 35 scientists and engineers with expertise in advanced therapeutic cell technologies, helping bridge the gap between research protocols and industrial manufacturing.