“Squeezing” Cells Could Transform Cell Therapy Manufacturing

Manufacturing today’s cell therapies remains expensive and complex due to the need for viruses or electric shocks to engineer patient cells. Yescarta^®, for example, one of the first CAR-T therapies approved for sale, takes 3-4 weeks to reach patients and has a price tag of $373,000.00. With CAR-T, expanding out a patient’s T-cells and transducing them with a virus is the most expensive and time-consuming step. That’s according to Armon Sharei, PhD, the 32-year-old CEO of SQZ Biotech, whose cell engineering platform was named as a top 10 world-changing technology by Scientific American in 2014.