Curate Biosciences announced the commercial launch of its Curate® Cell Processing System. The first-of-its-kind Curate System produces better starting materials for CAR-T cancer therapies and other cell therapies. Its exceptionally gentle microfluidic process recovers about 90% of white blood cells with elimination of more than 90% of red cells and 99% of platelets from patient-sourced leukapheresis blood product, delivering cells that support increased transduction efficiency for therapy manufacturing. Over the past year, in advance of the launch, the company has provided the Curate System for external testing at more than ten leading cell therapy sites across industry, academia, and government. These third-party evaluations have confirmed the superiority of the system’s performance, its ease of use, and its value to cell therapy manufacturing.
The Curate Cell Processing System uses the company’s proprietary Deterministic Cell Separation™ microfluidic technology, which is gentle to the cells while delivering unparalleled recovery and purity of target white blood cells. The Curate System has been designed to minimize labor skill requirements and hands-on time, processing a Leukopak of blood cells in ~45 minutes in a single pass. Cell therapy manufacturers will be able to incorporate the advanced Curate System in their workflow to improve end-to-end processing, reducing overall cost, time-to-dose, and potential for production failures. The product launch today is an enabling step, as the Curate System is a keystone to providing more affordable and accessible next-generation therapies to treat and even cure intractable diseases.
Current cell isolation methods used in cell therapy production require high physical forces and chemical reagents that lose 30-40% of patient-donated white blood cells, on average, before gene transfer takes place. That upfront cell loss adds days and substantial cost as drugmakers must then increase the cell population to reach a required dose level of genetically modified cells, which impacts therapeutic efficacy. For late-stage cancer patients who have not had success with other treatments, shortening the time to produce these therapies is critical, and each additional production day dramatically increases costs. The Curate System alleviates these core industry concerns.
“The Curate System’s entry into the market promises to transform approaches to making a cell therapy, by delivering near-complete recovery of white blood cells with second-to-none purity and increased patient sample-to-sample consistency,” said David Backer, Curate Biosciences’ new CEO. “New customers will discover what our early-access biopharma and academic partners have already seen: our microfluidic approach outperforms today’s standard methods.”
“We’re excited to see years of investment, support from NIH, and the hard work of our fantastic team leading to this moment,” said Founder & Chairman Mike Grisham. “The company has gained feedback from users, finalized the product and is growing our commercial team, so our Curate® Cell Processing System can help accelerate broad deployment of emerging cell therapies.”
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