When Argos Therapeutics Inc. sought out a manufacturing consultant to come up with an automated cell therapy machine for treating cancer, HIV and other diseases, the North Carolina company turned to the San Diego office of Invetech.
Teams at Invetech, which has its headquarters in Melbourne, Australia, came up with the first machine to produce personalized immunotherapies from human RNA, what one executive described as a marriage of science and engineering to make immunotherapies more accessible—not to mention less costly—to patients and their insurers.
The device goes into clinical trials this summer. If successful, it will eliminate the need for dozens of clean rooms and costly workers needed to process therapies from a patient’s own cells.
It’s all in a day’s work for Invetech, which has collaborated with a wide variety of customers, ranging from d-Con, the popular pest control product, to The Coca-Cola Company, the giant soft drinker maker, to Organovo, a local biotech company.