Cellares Corporation, a life sciences technology company that automates cell therapy manufacturing, has announced it has secured $82 million in a Series B round, bringing total funding to date to $100 million.
The round was led by new investor Decheng Capital and co-led by existing investor Eclipse Ventures. Skyviews Life Science joined as a new investor, with previous investor 8VC also participating.
The company said in a statement, “This latest funding will accelerate development of the Cell Shuttle, Cellares’ scalable factory-in-a-box. The Cell Shuttle enables end-to-end automation of the labor- and time-intensive process of creating highly-individualized cell therapies, including CAR-T therapies currently used to treat blood cancers by modifying and growing cells from the patient’s own immune system to attack cancer cells. Cellares’ single platform allows pre-clinical development to easily transfer to the clinical environment – saving years compared with traditional manufacturing methods – and enables quick and efficient commercial scalability.”
“There are more than 450,000 patients today who could potentially benefit from CAR-T cell therapies, a number expected to grow into the millions in a few years’ time.1 Less than 1% of these patients are able to get access to these therapies, due to a lack of scalable cell manufacturing technologies,” said Fabian Gerlinghaus, co-founder and CEO of Cellares. “This latest round is validation of the work Cellares is doing to become the automated, high-throughput solution with the flexibility and customization necessary to overcome the biggest obstacles in cell therapy manufacturing today.”
