Lonza and Agilent to Integrate Analytical Tech into Cell Therapy Manufacturing

Lonza, a global cell and gene therapy manufacturer, and Agilent Technologies, a leader in life sciences analytics, announced a strategic collaboration on December 15, 2021, aiming to improve personalized cell therapy production.

The partnership intends to integrate Agilent's analytical technologies into Lonza's Cocoon Platform, a system designed for patient-scale cell therapy manufacturing. This collaboration seeks to address challenges in product quality and consistency inherent in complex cell therapies, which often vary significantly between patients.

The companies plan to identify and define critical quality attributes (CQAs) necessary for effective cell therapies. By embedding Agilent's analytical tools within the Cocoon Platform's automated workflows, manufacturers can perform real-time, on-demand in-process controls and release testing. This offers greater assurance of product quality, especially for autologous therapies reliant on variable patient starting materials.

This initiative is expected to lead to more consistent drug products and contribute to increasing access to life-saving cell-based therapies. The project aims to establish optimal CQAs for manufacturing and drive production processes to meet these benchmarks.