Galapagos is teaming up with the US’s largest blood supply group to try to establish a nationwide network of decentralized CAR-T manufacturing.
The partnership with Blood Centers of America, or BCA, will give Galapagos access to the organization’s community blood centers across the country, according to a press release. Each of the sites will be responsible for working with “five or six” regional hospitals and other healthcare offices that administer CAR-Ts, Galapagos CFO Thad Huston told Endpoints News, helping patients potentially receive the treatments in seven days. And it would potentially shave several days or weeks from current methods.
Robert Hughes“Everybody’s interested in decentralization,” Galapagos’ global head of technical operations Robert Hughes told Endpoints. “Fortunately, I think our leadership saw it a couple of years ahead of everybody else, and I think this puts us really in the forefront to be able to implement the model and demonstrate its effectiveness.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Hughes added that the partnership will cover Galapagos’ current three experimental CAR-Ts for blood cancer and any of the company’s additional CAR-Ts that move into the clinic.
Galapagos’ CAR-T manufacturing process transports cells used for CAR-T using cold chain technology rather than cryopreservation, Hughes said. Repeatedly freezing and thawing CAR-T cells while moving them from site to site can result in a higher rate of decay than refrigeration, he said.
“Once it’s frozen, it’s stable, and you can ship it around the world, which is what the current paradigm is,” Hughes said. The decentralized model “increases patient access to a product that doesn’t have to go through that freeze-thaw cycle.”
Thad HustonBCA blood centers are all independent from one another, according to the network’s website, allowing them to be flexible depending on what their communities need. All of the locations can manufacture cell therapies using current GMP and GTP practices and hold required FDA and state licenses.
Wednesday’s move comes after Galapagos previously signed similar deals with Thermo Fisher in January and Landmark Bio last November. Huston said Galapagos will likely be enlisting more partners in other parts of the world to continue expanding its decentralized footprint.
“I hope you’ll see many more press releases from us, or more details, to go to other markets, both in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East and other other parts of the world,” Huston said.