Base to Base biotech podcast 20: Terumo BCT boosts CAR-T cell manufacturing, and Orbis on macrocycles

This week, our conversations are with Wenyan Leong, director of APAC commercial and global strategic partnerships for cell and gene therapies at Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies, and Morten Graugaard, CEO of Orbis Medicines.

Interview times:

04:01 Terumo BCT

24:52 Orbis Medicines

Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies shows integrated 3-in-1 CAR-T workflow with quantum platform

Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies, (Terumo BCT), a medical technology company, recently published a new protocol in a paper demonstrating expanded capabilities for its quantum system to unlock rapid CAR-T cell expansion.

The protocol consolidates the processes of T cell activation, lentiviral vector transduction and expansion of CAR-T cells in a single Quantum system, simplifying procedures that have been highly variable and dependent on a skilled workforce. The protocol demonstrated enhancement in manufacturing efficiency, with a two-fold increase in transduction efficiency over manual culture and the ability to consistently produce more than 12bn CAR-T cells in 7 to 8 days.

Terumo BCT’s products, software and services enable customers to collect and prepare blood and cells to help treat challenging diseases and conditions. Its customers include blood centres, hospitals, therapeutic apheresis clinics, cell collection and processing organisations, researchers and private medical practices.

Orbis pushes macrocycles to the fore

Morten Graugaard, formerly a partner at Novo Holdings, is now CEO of Orbis Medicines.

Orbis combines big data, AI and a big vision of making a class of molecules, macrocycles, reliably designable for the first time.

The company launched last year and closed a Series A for a total of €116m in funding so far to usher in a new era of macrocycle drug development.

To date, discovery of macrocycles, a class of cyclic peptides, has yielded transformative drugs but the complexity and diversity of these molecules have thwarted attempts at designing them from scratch. To overcome this challenge, Orbis' technology generates and tests vast numbers of macrocycle permutations with incredible speed, generating huge data sets that are fed into AI as real-life training data.

Orbis' computational tools sift the data to find needles in an infinite haystack – macrocycles of the perfect size and structure to do the job of injectable drugs – but in the form of a pill.

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