CellPoint and Lonza Enter Strategic Collaboration

CellPoint, a cell therapy company developing CAR-T therapeutics for use at the point-of-care, has signed an agreement with Lonza's Personalized Medicine Business Unit to employ Lonza's Cocoon Platform for clinical manufacturing of CellPoint's CAR-T cell therapies at the point-of-care, more rapidly and at lower cost.

One of the key hurdles in making CAR-T immunotherapies more accessible to larger patient populations is the difficulty in manufacturing at-scale, robustly, and close to patients. CellPoint and Lonza will utilize Lonza's Cocoon Platform in combination with CellPoint's online xCellit Platform for workflow management to manufacture cell therapies at the point-of-care. This can lower manufacturing costs and decrease time to treatment, with vein-to-vein time lowered to as little as 5-7 days compared to the current industry standard of more than a month, and also circumvent complex logistics.

CellPoint will be responsible for site selection, technical operations, clinical development and regulatory approval of the CAR-T therapies, while Lonza will be responsible for all aspects of integrating and using the Cocoon Platform at the selected clinical sites.

Tol Trimborn, chief executive officer of CellPoint, said, "CellPoint's T-cell therapies have enormous potential for treating various cancers. This agreement will allow us to accelerate our path to the clinic, treating more patients sooner, and help to solve the key issues facing CAR-T therapeutics. We are very pleased that our disruptive model and agile CAR-T development organization is backed by the most reliable partner in the industry, using the Cocoon platform."

Eytan Abraham, head of Lonza Personalized Medicine, commented, "We look forward to collaborating with CellPoint to enable and accelerate bringing novel cancer immunotherapies to the clinic and patients. Use of the Cocoon Platform, coupled with the array of process development, manufacturing expertise and tools that Lonza brings to the bear, will help to accelerate the path to the clinic, and provide a smooth path to commercial approval. By leveraging the Cocoon's unique platform capabilities, this collaboration aims to illustrate the promise and feasibility of manufacturing autologous immunotherapies at the point-of-care into approved routine use."