Robotics specialist Multiply Labs and Thermo Fisher Scientific inked a deal to expand their partnership to further automate the cell therapy production process.
The two companies will integrate Multiply Lab's robotic technology and Thermo Fisher’s cell therapy instruments to "fully" automate production of the advanced therapies, according to a Feb. 12 press release.
Financial terms of the partnership weren’t disclosed. Thermo Fisher, along with Charles River Labs, first signed on with Multiply Labs in 2022 to automate cell therapy production.
“With so many groundbreaking cell therapies available or forthcoming for patients, we cannot afford to let manual processes reduce scalability and stand in the way of access,” Xavier De Mollerat Du Jeu, senior director of research and development at Thermo Fisher, said in the release. “Not only are we taking our incubator partnership to the next level to deliver a fully-automated GMP product, but together we will engineer the automation of our latest-generation closed system centrifuge—an essential instrument for cell therapy manufacturing,”
The pairing is expected to increase throughput as well as reduce labor costs, because the processes can be performed by a single manufacturing operator. Typically, traditional manufacturing requires between four and eight operators.
Further, the end-to-end automated workflow can significantly cut the amount of manufacturing space needed to produce cell therapies.
Other key manufacturing steps, including upstream and downstream cell processing, also can be conducted automatically, according to the companies.