GE Healthcare and G-CON Manufacturing will work together to improve the manufacture of cell therapy treatments. G-CON will build the cleanrooms and GE will design the processes to use in them. The processes that the designs will focus on are end-to-end cell therapy and viral vectors production.
The end product will be a fully functional production line that drug developers and manufacturers can purchase that can be housed in a warehouse-type structure. The full functionality will speed up the development process within a field where the highly specific nature of the process often slows production greatly.
A specific example of the collaboration is last year GE launched FlexFactory, a cell therapy manufacturing platform that is semi-automated and modular end-to-end. This was designed for clinical trials and commercial activities.
FlexFactory can be installed in a cleanroom provided by G-CON, offering the entire process without the manufacturing bottleneck.
Commenting on the alliance, Catarina Flyborg, General Manager of Cell and Gene Therapy at GE Healthcare, said: “The combination of the G-CON infrastructure along with GE Healthcare’s cell therapy and vector platform, will aid in reducing the time to market for cell therapies that need vector manufacturing to be on-site and connected to the overall therapy workflow.”
Though the main focus will be cell therapy, the collaboration will also include cleanrooms technology for lentivirus and adeno-associated virus, for emerging gene therapy treatments.
The companies have previously combined their technologies on a similar project in 2010. The earlier collaboration was on portable manufacturing systems for vaccines and therapeutics.