Avantor Partners with BlueWhale Bio to Advance Next-Generation CAR-T Manufacturing

Avantor, Inc., a leading global provider of mission-critical products and services to customers in the life sciences and advanced technologies industries, today announced a strategic partnership with BlueWhale Bio, a commercial-stage company dedicated to transforming immune cell therapy manufacturing and addressing the unmet need in CAR-T production by streamlining manufacturing, reducing variability, and shortening time-to-patient.

The partnership combines Avantor's bioprocessing and custom ancillary-reagent manufacturing capabilities with BlueWhale Bio's Synecta™ cell-derived nanoparticle (CDNP) platform, which mimics natural T-cell stimulation. The collaboration aims to accelerate CDNP manufacturing scale-up to help CAR-T developers significantly reduce expansion time - potentially expanding patient access and manufacturing capacity across the growing cell therapy sector. Together, the teams will produce GMP-grade CDNP materials to support this next-generation manufacturing approach.

"Our partnership with BlueWhale Bio reflects Avantor's commitment to delivering highly relevant manufacturing solutions to customers and enabling next-generation therapies through innovation, reliability, and scale," said Emmanuel Ligner, President and Chief Executive Officer of Avantor. "CAR-T therapies have transformed cancer care, but manufacturing remains a major bottleneck characterized by high cost, variability, and lengthy release cycles. The Avantor–BlueWhale Bio collaboration addresses these challenges by integrating next-generation activation and expansion reagents into a GMP-ready, scalable platform."

Data from BlueWhale Bio's preclinical and clinical programs demonstrate earlier cell division, higher cell yields, and fewer process interventions, indicating potential to reduce CAR-T process time and reduce cell stress during manufacturing. Synecta™ T1 CDNPs are used in a clinical trial using 3-day CAR-T manufacturing.

"BlueWhale Bio was founded to address the toughest manufacturing challenges in cell therapy. Failure to meet target dose levels in immune cell therapies can have a critical downstream impact on patients," said Peter Keller, Chief Executive Officer of BlueWhale Bio. "By partnering with Avantor, we're combining our novel Synecta™ platform with industrial-strength execution to accelerate the journey from discovery to delivery."