Personalized therapies must become more economical

Automating the production of personalized cancer therapies is crucial. This approach not only reduces costs but also minimizes the need for highly qualified personnel, making widespread use feasible. Additionally, the complex quality controls for each therapeutic agent must become significantly more efficient.

The future of oncology is personalized, with therapies tailored precisely to each individual’s cancer. A fundamental aspect of this approach is an exact genetic diagnosis of the individual tumor and its development throughout the entire treatment period, including aftercare. This ensures optimal treatment at all times.

Making production faster and more cost-effective

Production of individual therapies must also be automated, emphasizes Felix Westhoff, Head of Project and Quality Management at HSE•AG: “Without automation, it will not be possible to make personalized methods such as CAR T-cell or mRNA cancer vaccination – however successful they may be – available to as many cancer patients as possible. The current costs of up to several 100,000 dollars per treatment are still far too high for this and the production rates of existing methods are also far too low for widespread use.”

What’s more, automation is also unavoidable due to the need for skilled labor. “With intuitive operation, a device not only makes a lot of manual work superfluous. It also reduces the training requirements for operating personnel,” says Westhoff. 

One device each for mRNA vaccines and CAR T-cell activation

In the field of mRNA cancer vaccines, for example, automation means that the synthesis of the mRNA sequences, whose protein products specifically immunize the organism against the patient’s cancer cells, and the production of the lipid envelopes, which mediate the transfer of the mRNA into body cells, are integrated into a single device wherever possible. In the same way, the entire process of producing a CAR T-cell therapeutic must be brought together in a continuous system, starting with the selection of T-cells from the patient’s serum and the vector-induced activation of the T-cells on the patient-specific tumor through to the selection and isolation of the activated cells, for example using magnetic beads.

Quality controls must also be automated

In addition, there is another area in all personalized therapies where efficiency must be increased: the quality controls required for approval. Up to now, they have required practically as much effort as the production of the individual therapeutics, emphasizes Westhoff: “Automating the verification assays can save as much time as automating the production. And the need for qualified personnel can also be reduced to a similar extent.”