Cellular Origins, Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult and Resolution Therapeutics form consortium
Cambridge, Edinburgh and London, UK, July 11, 2025 – Cellular Origins, a TTP company, focused on enabling scalable, cost-effective, and efficient robotic manufacture of cell and gene therapies (CGTs), the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult (CGT Catapult), an independent innovation and technology organisation specialising in the advancement of the cell and gene therapy industry, and Resolution Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company pioneering regenerative macrophage therapy to treat inflammatory and fibrotic diseases, today announce the formation of a consortium. The consortium has been awarded a cross-industry Smart Grant of £1 million from Innovate UK, UK’s national innovation agency.
The project aims to use novel technologies to deliver, for the first time internationally, a globally-unique, hyper-efficient, fully automated, scalable cell therapy manufacturing platform. The project commenced on July 1, 2025, and will last for 20 months.
The consortium partners have chosen to collaborate by combining their respective expertise in robotic and digital technologies, manufacturing processes, operations and facilities management, therapy development, novel product processes, and patient delivery. The partners intend to expand this collaboration further through future joint development and delivery capabilities. Providing additional support to the project are ScaleReady with its G-Rex bioreactor platform, and Autolomous with its AutoloMATE eBMR solution.
Edwin Stone, CEO, Cellular Origins, said:
Despite the incredible therapeutic performance of cell therapies, therapy development has greatly outpaced the ability for these treatments to be manufactured in sufficient quantities to reach all eligible patients. Manual manufacturing has only been able to be scaled up to deliver a few thousand patient doses per year. The CGT sector is currently only capable of manufacturing sufficient doses to treat less than 7% of eligible patients globally.To deliver therapies to the patients that need them requires fully automated manufacturing of the type that has revolutionised other high-tech manufacturing. This requires solving the cell therapy specific technology challenges that allow the adoption of advanced robotics and AI into cell therapy manufacturing. This partnership with the CGT Catapult and Resolution Therapeutics, and the funding by Innovate UK, will deliver the most advanced, fully tested, fully automated robotically operated CGT manufacturing platform to the market.
The project will deliver full integration of the hardware and software of Constellation, Cellular Origins’ CGT robotic manufacturing platform, at the CGT Catapult’s Digital and Automation Testbeds in the Stevenage Manufacturing Innovation Centre, UK. These Testbeds serve as good manufacturing practice (GMP)-mirroring sandbox environments for de-risked and accelerated testing and adoption of next-generation technologies. CGT Catapult will commission the platform within the real-world manufacturing environment of its Testbeds to support the national and international roll-out of Constellation. This world-first installation will be fully accessible to collaborators through the Digital and Automation Testbeds.
The project will also benefit from the expert input, advice and direction of Resolution Therapeutics. Resolution will provide key corporate, clinical and commercial expertise as a therapy developer of a promising and exciting new type of cell therapy called Regenerative Macrophage Therapy (RMT) with lead asset to treat end-stage liver disease. Resolution will inform the development direction and viability to ensure the adaptability of the platform for novel cell therapies such as for Resolution’s groundbreaking macrophage therapy products. This will result in the route map and the transformation from manual clinical-scale manufacturing to fully automate, GMP-ready, commercial-scale CGT manufacturing at the scale required to meet areas of significant unmet need.
Cellular Origins has already completed pre-activity for the project by installing the first Constellation system at the CGT Catapult’s Digital and Automation Testbeds in Stevenage, UK. The intention is for full market supply and application of the automated robotics manufacturing platform for CGT developers, integrating known and proven instrumentation from trusted third-party suppliers with minimum process change, within Cellular Origins’ workstations and factory installations.