Ori Biotech, a leader in cell and gene therapy (CGT) manufacturing technologies, and the Cell Therapy Manufacturing Center (CTMC), a joint venture between National Resilience Inc. and MD Anderson Cancer Center, have entered a collaborative partnership to develop industrial manufacturing processes for cell therapies.
 
The partnership will accelerate process development, clinical implementation, and commercialization of novel cell therapies. Furthermore, it will combine Ori’s technology platform with CTMC’s manufacturing capabilities and, in the first instance, will focus on a cell therapy invented by Dr. Sattva Neelapu, professor of Lymphoma/Myeloma at MD Anderson. The partnership enables CTMC pre-commercial access to Ori’s technology as part of its LightSpeed Early Access Program (LEAP).
 
“Ori and CTMC have specifically partnered with the goal of increasing patient access to potentially life-saving cell therapies. This partnership will have a considerable impact on the cell therapy field by implementing innovative, digitally enabled process discovery and automated manufacturing solutions,” said Jason C. Foster, CEO, Ori Biotech. “Ori is partnering with leading organizations like CTMC to deliver technology that is fundamental to creating widespread patient access.”
 
“Ori and CTMC are both focused on accelerating cell therapies to reach more cancer patients earlier. Ori’s automated manufacturing platform enhances our ability to robustly deliver autologous cell therapies for first-in-human clinical studies while also directly leading to eventual scaled commercialization,” said Jason Bock, CEO at CTMC.
 
Ori and CTMC have highlighted several key objectives for the partnership, including the adaptation and digitization of existing CAR-T processes already in CTMC development labs onto the Ori platform to demonstrate technical feasibility. CTMC will perform process comparability runs to demonstrate successful process transfer and comparison to existing in-house manufacturing processes.