NEW YORK – A group of firms, including ScaleReady, Wilson Wolf Manufacturing, Bio-Techne, and CellReady, on Tuesday awarded a $300,000 grant to a researcher at Stanford Medicine's Laboratory for Cell and Gene Medicine to advance development of the lab's G-Rex platform for CAR T-cell therapy manufacturing.
The grant was awarded to Steve Feldman, scientific director and site head of Stanford Medicine's Laboratory for Cell and Gene Medicine. The G-Rex, or gas permeable rapid expansion, platform was developed by Wilson Wolf and is designed to produce immune cells — such as T cells, natural killer cells, and hematopoietic cells — for cell therapy treatments.
The G-Rex grant program, led by G-Rex manufacturing firm ScaleReady, is a $20 million initiative to advance cell and gene therapy development and manufacturing. The grant program also connects grantees to partner organizations for support with current good manufacturing practice (cGMP), quality and regulatory affairs, and cell and gene therapy business operations.
The grant funding will support the lab's use of the G-Rex-centric manufacturing process in an upcoming Phase I trial for GPC2-positive pediatric neuroblastoma and medulloblastoma. The trial will also use Bio-Techne's automated multiplexing immunoassay platform, Ella, as a potency assay to measure the biological activity of the treatment. Stanford Medicine's Laboratory for Cell and Gene Medicine will also work with CellReady, a contract development and manufacturing organization, to create G-Rex master batch records for manufacturing the CAR T-cell treatment.
Finally, Stanford Medicine's Laboratory for Cell and Gene Medicine will also develop a technology originally developed by Wilson Wolf to enable closed-system T-cell purification that can be performed directly in a G-Rex device.