Jason C. Foster (Ori Biotech CEO) was joined by Matthew Hewitt (Charles River Laboratories Vice President, CTO Manufacturing) for a presentation of new data, an in-person IRO demo, and a networking cocktail reception.
In early 2024, Ori and Charles River collaborated through Ori’s LightSpeed Early Access Program (LEAP), designed to provide access to the IRO platform for use in clinically relevant applications. During the collaboration, Ori and Charles River conducted head-to-head process runs comparing the IRO platform’s biological performance to Charles Rivers’ gold-standard: a process specifically optimized for CAR-T therapy, over two years, using an alternative cell therapy manufacturing technology.
With minimal process optimization, the IRO platform performed at least as well in some metrics and outperformed the current process in both cell growth and total CAR+ cells out of the box. IRO achieved an average of 51% CAR+ expression and 2.1 billion total CAR+ cells in a seven-to-eight-day process versus 1.6 billion total CAR+ cells in the legacy manufacturing technology.