France-based Astraveus and the Netherlands Center for the Clinical Advancement of Stem Cell and Gene Therapies (NecstGen) have partnered to evaluate Astraveus’ benchtop cell factory for the manufacturing of CAR-T therapies.
Per the deal, NecstGen will utilize Astraveus’ proprietary Lakhesys technology at its facility in Leiden, to demonstrate its potential to significantly reduce costs and increase efficiency in CAR-T manufacturing in comparison to incumbent industry benchmarks. Additionally, NecstGen will produce lentiviral vectors for Astraveus’ internal research and development needs.
Earlier this year, Astraveus — which exited stealth with an oversubscribed $18.7 million (€16.5 million) seed round in June 2023 — announced what it said was the first ever successful end-to-end production of CAR-T cells within a microfluidic benchtop system utilizing its Lakhesys technology.
“Our approach has successfully miniaturized a hugely complex process, reducing the scale of the manufacturing system to the size of a book – less than one hundredth the size of existing technologies. With a production time of only 26 hours, we have also demonstrated that our bead-free microfluidic selection technology enables fast CAR-T cell manufacturing. These results show its potential to be much cheaper than rival technologies,” said Astraveus CEO Jérémie Laurent.
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