CellPoint and Lonza Enter Strategic Collaboration to Deliver CAR-T Cells to Patients at Point-of-Care

- Goal to rapidly develop several T-cell therapies on the Cocoon Platform for clinical point-of-care manufacturing

- Aims to reduce vein-to-vein time for patients to 5-7 days

LEIDEN, Netherlands, June 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CellPoint, a cell therapy company developing CAR-T therapeutics for use at the point-of-care, announces 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.

CellPoint is developing various CAR-T immunotherapies to treat multiple cancers. One of the key hurdles in making these therapies 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.

The agreement leverages CellPoint's proprietary CAR-T cell therapies, process management expertise and automated workflow along with Lonza's Cocoon Platform, a world-leading hardware solution for integrated cell and gene therapy manufacturing, as well as Lonza's extensive process development expertise. 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."