Manufacturing & Logistics in Cell Therapies

Manufacturing & Logistics in Cell Therapies ?

Involved in the acquisition of Bluerock Therapeutics by Bayer in 2019, as Investment Director at Leaps, Alasdair Thong is a Venture Partner in several international VC funds. Given his strong expertise in stem cell therapy biotechs, we asked him about the key challenges that need to be addressed by the industry.

Transcript:

It’s frustrating to me as a VC that, you know, a lot of the companies I see out there are focused much more on this target driven biology thing, rather than actually saying, you know what, that’s all finding well that there’s 20 companies which are solving that problem. What we really need to solve is – when they solve that and they have a product, how do we scale that manufacturing, get it to the people that need it the most. And what most meaningfully being able to come up with a logistics system to actually personalize all of this, while we do not currently have an allogeneic or universally applicable strategy.

And that for me is the thing that keeps me up at night the most when i think about the stem cell companies.

You know, how do we actually say this isn’t just going to be something which we sell to pharma for the target biology and the disease biology and let them deal with all of the problems. I really care about the impact of these therapies. And to have impact, that means getting these therapies to patients in the most viable way possible.

Maybe part of that is the manufacturing side, maybe part of that is the logistics side of collecting patient-specific cells and getting them to the right place. But those problems are actually the real problems that everyone’s going to face long-term. Because we can have a phase 3 study, we can have approved products and everything, but without a scalable infrastructure to get it to people and to get the costs down…

It doesn’t matter. You haven’t achieved anything.

Yeah, the democratization part, I think is very important. That’s actually one
of the things we are very focused on, in TreeFrog.

And I think there’s been this sense in the field that, as we say in French, “L’intendance suivra”. Meaning the logistics will happen.
And that’s not something, it’s not that easy.

It’s very “Laisser faire”, which is not how we should be in this. We are so intense for every other part of it.

Yeah, I’m with you.