Cellerator and Region Østdanmark launch strategic collaboration to advance cell therapies
A new strategic collaboration between Cellerator and Region Østdanmark aims to tackle some of the barriers that prevent promising cell therapies from progressing from research towards clinical trials and, ultimately, patients.
The new partnership was formally launched at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen on Monday, with Cellerator CEO Thomas Carlsen and Rigshospitalet Research Director Malene Fischer signing the agreement.
Cell therapies are opening up new possibilities for treating serious diseases. But turning scientific discoveries into treatments remains difficult. Promising therapies can spend years in development – or never reach clinical trials at all – as researchers encounter challenges ranging from manufacturing and scale-up to quality requirements, regu-lation and access to specialised infrastructure.
Rigshospitalet and other hospitals in the region bring strong research and clinical environments, close contact with patients and experience in developing and manufacturing advanced therapies. Cellerator will complement these capabilities with expertise and infrastructure for cell therapy process development, manufacturing at larger scale and clinical readiness.
“The goal is not to duplicate what already exists, but to connect complementary capabilities across the therapy de-velopment journey. By bringing clinical, research and manufacturing expertise closer together, we can create better conditions for promising therapies to progress towards patients,” says Thomas Carlsen, CEO of Cellerator.
From laboratory to clinic
One focus of the collaboration will be the critical transition from research towards clinical trials – when a scientific concept has to become a therapy that can be manufactured consistently, tested for quality and meet the require-ments for use in patients.
Cellerator's new facility at DTU in Lyngby will be located only a few kilometres from Rigshospitalet – a practical ad-vantage in a field where expertise is highly specialised and living cell products can require careful handling.
The collaboration will also work to strengthen connections between researchers, clinicians, product developers, companies and manufacturing environments.
A longer-term partnership
Rather than focusing on a single project, the agreement establishes a framework for longer-term collaboration, in-cluding knowledge exchange, capability building and the identification of potential future projects. A joint steering group will identify priorities, with individual projects subject to separate agreements.
The longer-term ambition is to strengthen Denmark and the wider Medicon Valley region as a place where ad-vanced therapies are not only discovered, but can also be developed and ultimately brought closer to patients.
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