EVOcells - from cells to therapies
CELL THERAPY – NEXT GENERATION MODALITY TO REVOLUTIONIsE DISEASE TREATMENT
Cell therapy is a fast-growing and highly promising field of biomedical research that plays an important role in the development of novel therapeutics. This approach uses a cell product with therapeutic effect, derived from living cells that are cultivated outside of the body before being injected or transplanted. Cell therapy offers exceptional opportunities and has the potential to achieve substantial disease-modifying effects within a single treatment, or to even completely cure diseases.
The truly curative treatment potential of cell therapy involves:
- Replacing declining function of diseased tissue and/or stimulation of regeneration
- Stimulating cell-mediated immunity
- Broad applicability to diseases of pancreas, heart, muscle, immune system and others
A WORLD-CLASS INFRASTRUCTURE TO DELIVER OFF-THE-SHELF, ALLOGENEIC CELL THERAPY PRODUCTS TO PATIENTS
Functioning cells for cell therapy can be obtained from different sources: either from a healthy donor, from a patient, or from stem cells, including induced pluripotent stem cells (“iPSC”). Using iPSC for cell therapy has opened up stem cells as an almost unlimited source of consistent-quality material. Thus, manufacturing cell products from a single iPSC line overcomes many of the limitations when using such as scalability and reproducibility of manufacturing.
Therefore, EVOcells, Evotec’s approach to cell therapy, leverages iPSC-based technology and combines this with Evotec’s drug discovery and development platforms. Evotec’s industry leading iPSC platform has been developed over the last years to industrialise the use of iPSC technology in terms of throughput, reproducibility and robustness for applications both in drug screening as well as in next generation off-the-shelf allogeneic cell therapies.
Key attributes of the EVOcells technology platform include:
- Versatility: Many different cell types can be generated, addressing a broad range of disease areas
- Enhanced functionality: Genetic modifications to boost function
- Reduced immune rejection: Genetic modifications to enable allogeneic transplantation
- Scalability: GMP batch production to reduce complexity and cost of goods
The EVOcells platform covers all steps from research to development and manufacturing of cell therapy products. Thus, it comprises an end-to-end integrated process flow from project inception to the clinic, including cell differentiation, upscaling and GMP manufacturing. With the recent acquisition of Rigenerand, now Evotec (Modena) Srl, a high-quality cGMP manufacturing site was added to the EVOcells platform thereby adding capacity, critical expertise and capabilities to the critical scale-up of complex cell-based therapies.
SEEKING PARTNERSHIPS TO SYNERGIZE AND ACCELERATE
Evotec’s current project portfolio in cell therapy combines iPSC expertise with deep disease area expertise and covers the following areas
- Cancer treatment (immuno-oncology)
- Metabolic diseases
- Heart repair
- Exosome-based therapies
Ultimately, it is Evotec’s goal to provide safe highly effective cell therapy products to as many patients as possible across a broad range of disease areas. Thus, in addition to small molecules and biologics, cell therapy will become yet another major pillar of Evotec’s multimodality discovery and development platform.
Evotec is seeking partners to fully leverage our cell therapy platform and accelerate projects towards transformative therapies, both within existing disease areas and to expand into new disease areas.
Partnership models are flexible, and the relative contribution of Evotec and the respective partner at each stage of the project is mutually agreed on a project-by-project phase.
Please contact us for questions around collaborations and partnerships.
