Cesca Therapeutics’ Chief Technology Officer, Phil Coelho, Provides Deep Dive into the CAR-T Manufacturing Process in Cell & Gene Therapy

Cesca Therapeutics (NASDAQ:KOOL), a market leader in automated cell processing and point-of-care, autologous cell-based therapies, today announced that Phil Coelho, chief technology officer of the Company’s ThermoGenesis device division, was recently interviewed by Cell & Gene Therapy Insights.  The article, “Driving CAR-T Manufacture Optimization through Technology Innovation,” appears online (here) and in Volume 0404 2018 of the publication.

As quoted in the press release:

In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Coelho provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges faced by today’s CAR-T manufacturers, including lengthy treatment times and high costs, two significant obstacles to the more rapid uptake of these groundbreaking therapies. Notably, Mr. Coelho highlights the substantial loss (50-90%) of target cells that occurs during the current, manual process, as well as additional complications posed by use of traditional, and outdated, Ficoll or magnetic bead-based methods of cell selection and activation. Combating these avoidable cell losses is Cesca’s CAR-TXpress platform, consisting of the X-Lab™, X-Wash™ and X-BACS™ automated modules, which employ the Company’s proprietary Buoyancy Activated Cell Sorting (BACS) technology to more efficiently isolate a specific cell type from a complex mixture of cells, such as blood.

“We believe that our automated modules, when compared to legacy manual systems, provide meaningful performance gains in purifying mononuclear cells (MNCs), washing contaminants from cell fractions, antibody selection and activation of T-cells, while significantly shortening processing times,” noted Mr. Coelho. “At a minimum, we expect a 10–20% improvement in processing performance at every manufacturing step than obtained from existing manual processes.”

Click here to read the full press release.