Cellbase CT system suitable for GMP environments

The company, which will be found on Stand 12 at the event, due to be held on 18-21 May 2011 in the Netherlands, will also be participating in the Strategies for commercialisation workshop, entitled 'Advanced Automation for Autologous Processing'.

TAP will highlight the extensive development undertaken to design the new Cellbase CT system, which will enable it to be used in a GMP facility for the rapid and cost-effective scale-out of existing manual cell culture processes in T-flasks.

As part of the 'Strategies for Commercialisation Tract' on 19 May, Dr Rosemary Drake of TAP Biosystems will review the challenges of manufacturing autologous cell therapies such as ensuring the separation of individual patient therapies when processing multiple patients in parallel and maintaining aseptic conditions.

Drake will analyse different manual and automated approaches of manufacturing cell therapies and will discuss data using the Cellbase CT system as an example of how to achieve aseptic, reproducible ex-vivo expansion of a clinically applicable neuronal cell line to treat patients post stroke.

She said: 'For more than 20 years at TAP Biosystems we have been developing and installing systems that are routinely used to produce allogenic cell therapies such as the dermal substitute Dermagraft.

'This has provided us with a unique insight, as well as expertise of what is critical for successfully automating the manufacture of cell therapies in a GMP environment.

'To meet the challenge of producing affordable autologous and patient-specific cell therapies, we have developed Cellbase CT.

'Our analysis shows that the specially designed automation of a conventional T-flask approach to ex-vivo expansion can offer an economically viable route for manufacturing autologous cell therapies with minimal process change and therefore low risk,' added Drake.