Autolus Therapeutics, a commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company developing, manufacturing and delivering next-gen programmed T cell therapies, has announced plans to assess the feasibility of Cellares’ Cell Shuttle platform to complement its commercial manufacturing operations at the Nucleus facility in Stevenage, UK.

Cellares’ Cell Shuttle platform integrates all unit operations for CAR T manufacturing into a single-use, closed, pre-sterilized cartridge operated on a fully automated platform capable of processing up to 16 patient batches in parallel.

According to Cellares, this architecture enables a single IDMO Smart Factory to deliver up to 10-fold higher throughput than conventional cell therapy manufacturing facilities of similar footprint and headcount, while providing partners with more consistent batch quality, lower cost, and greater resilience in commercial supply. Cellares pairs the Cell Shuttle with Cell Q, a purpose-built quality control platform for cell therapy drug products that transforms analytical testing from manual, fragmented workflows into automated, high-throughput methods with fully digital, compliant batch records.

The Cellares Cell Shuttle platform was the first to receive the FDA’s Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMT) designation, which offers partners additional touchpoints and priority review mechanisms when referencing the platform in their INDs, BLAs, and post-approval supplements.

“We are evaluating obe-cel in a range of indications beyond acute leukemia, and if successful, expect future demand to exceed the manufacturing capacity at our Nucleus facility. Cellares’ Cell Shuttle platform may provide an attractive option for a capital-efficient expansion of our manufacturing footprint in the future,” said Christian Itin, PhD, Chief Executive Officer of Autolus.

“Autolus has already built a strong manufacturing foundation,” said Fabian Gerlinghaus, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cellares. “Our role is to extend that foundation with a global infrastructure that can reduce cost and process failure rates, while meeting total patient demand.”