The Austrian deep tech startup Sarcura today announced it has secured a €1.7M grant from FFG’s Life Sciences Program 2023.
Cell therapy holds the promise of curing cancer and other diseases, yet the manufacturing of patient-derived cell therapies remains a formidable challenge for the industry.
Quality and scalability issues contribute to substantial therapeutic costs, currently restricting access to these life-saving treatments to a mere 3% of eligible patients.
“Imagine the entire clean room manufacturing suite, along with the analytics lab, shrunk to the size of a suitcase, enabling the autonomous processing of thousands of CAR-T therapies. This marks the new era of cell therapy manufacturing that Sarcura aims to build,” Sarcura Co-Founder and CEO Daniela Buchmayr highlights.
"While automating manufacturing in the CGT industry is a logical and crucial next step, it will only yield incremental improvements as long as automation relies on a room-sized cleanroom footprint and separate analytical labs. The crucial missing elements are control intelligence and miniaturisation.”
As proven in other industries, transitioning from operator control to machine-generated real-time analytics will evolve automation into machine autonomy.
Sarcura is implementing this by utilising silicon chip technology to develop specialised microfluidic cartridges tailored for the unique processing and control requirements of cell therapy manufacturing.
The company will leverage this new grant to further advance the development of its SiPlex Prototype, a chip that integrates multiple cell sorting structures employing revolutionary silicon photonic technology on the size of a stamp.
