Automation Partnership introduced the Cellbase CT, a system to automate the ex-vivo expansion of autologous cell therapies, at the Cell and Gene Therapy Forum in Washington on 24-26 January 2011.
The Cellbase CT system, which was developed in collaboration with cell-therapy experts, can be used in a GMP facility for rapid scale-up of existing manual cell-culture processes in T-flasks.
Cellbase CT provides researchers with a fully contained, aseptic cell-expansion area where the risk of external contamination or internal cross-contamination has been eliminated.
This enables scientists to manufacture multiple autologous cell therapies from many individual patients in parallel, making the Cellbase CT a cost-effective alternative to labour-intensive manual cell culture.
Cellbase CT comes with a range of tools to support validation in a GMP-regulated environment and has been developed and extensively tested to enable clean, reproducible expansion of clinically applicable stem cells and other cell types.
'By implementing Cellbase CT during Phase II, cell-therapy products can be tested alongside manually produced material so that phase III can be fully supported by the automated system,' said Tim Ward, director of Cell Culture at Automation Partnership.
'The simple scalability of the system means that the same process technology can be used throughout development and into production, reducing the high level of risk and cost associated with the need to prove equivalency following late-stage process changes,' he added.
