Automating Cell Therapy: A Closed, Digital Platform Delivers Consistent, Sterile, Scalable T‑Cell Production

By Chesney Michels, Director, Emerging Technology for Cell & Gene Therapy

This scientific poster introduces an automated, end‑to‑end system designed to address major bottlenecks in cell‑therapy manufacturing, which traditionally depends on complex, manual workflows that limit scalability and increase variability. The platform integrates all essential steps—cell selection, activation, transduction, expansion, and harvest—into a closed, digitally connected process that reduces operator intervention and enhances reproducibility across multiple donors. Experimental runs using engineered T cells demonstrate consistent growth kinetics, reliable metabolic profiles, and robust performance across different seeding densities. The system effectively standardizes phenotypes despite donor‑to‑donor variation, yielding CD8‑dominant products with favorable naïve‑like and effector characteristics, minimal exhaustion, and strong functional potency. Additional findings show improved transduction efficiency at higher seeding densities, balanced with careful monitoring of safety‑relevant vector copy numbers. Together, the data suggest that this automated framework enables faster optimization, higher throughput, and a scalable route to producing high‑quality cell‑therapy products suitable for clinical manufacturing.