Kytopen Corp., a leader in continuous flow cellular engineering, has announced a collaboration with BlueWhale Bio, a company focused on advancing cell-based therapies by revolutionizing immune cell therapy manufacturing. The partnership aims to develop a non-viral manufacturing workflow designed to overcome current production bottlenecks and speed up the delivery of engineered cell therapies to patients.
While CAR-T therapies have shown promise, they face major challenges such as long vein-to-vein times of 3 to 5 weeks, high costs, and safety concerns, limiting broader adoption. Next-generation treatments need to reduce manufacturing delays, improve therapeutic effectiveness, and increase scalability to make these lifesaving therapies more accessible worldwide.
The collaboration leverages BlueWhale Bio’s Synecta CDNPs, which mimic the body’s natural T-cell activators to enhance T-cell activation, and Kytopen’s Flowfect technology, which uses a continuous flow system combining mechanical, electrical, and chemical forces to efficiently engineer large quantities of healthy cells rapidly.
Together, the technologies offer a streamlined, non-viral gene delivery process capable of producing more advanced therapeutic doses quickly while maintaining cell health.
Kevin Gutshall, Chief Commercial Officer at Kytopen, said the partnership is “a pivotal step forward in personalized cell therapy” that will help reduce manufacturing times and costs, accelerating patient access to these treatments.
Both technologies are already in clinical use: Synecta CDNPs are part of a Phase I clinical trial, and Flowfect supports several therapies progressing toward IND submissions.