October 8, 2020 -- TreeFrog Therapeutics and Invetech have entered a strategic partnership to develop a good manufacturing practices (GMP)-compliant device for high-throughput stem cell encapsulation by the end of 2022.
The companies have been collaborating since 2019 to turn the TreeFrog research and development (R&D) encapsulation set-up into an automated single-use device for industrial bioproduction. A beta encapsulation system designed by Invetech achieves a throughput of 1,000 stem cell capsules per second.
Stem cell encapsulation protects cells against hydrodynamic damages, which is helpful in large-scale bioproduction. Encapsulation can also recapitulate a biomimetic stem cell niche to promote fast growth and accurate chromosome segregation, according to the firms. The new technology has the potential to reduce manufacturing costs by 10-fold while improving batch size, yields, and genomic quality.