Ginkgo Bioworks, Universal Cells form research collaboration

Ginkgo Bioworks (DNA) announced a research collaboration with Universal Cells, an Astellas (ALPMY) company, to optimize next-generation induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cancer cell therapies. This collaboration underscores Ginkgo’s capacity to deploy high-throughput biological approaches to tackle the complex challenge set associated with development of therapies targeting solid tumors. iPSC-derived cell therapies have the potential to transform cancer care by offering scalable, ‘off-the-shelf’ treatment options. However, bringing efficacious therapies to patients requires robust design and screening processes to improve persistence in the patient to enable durable clinical responses. By combining Universal Cells’ proprietary iPSC-derived cell technologies with Ginkgo’s expertise in design and screening large CAR libraries and its high throughput, multimodal immune cell engineering platform, the companies aim to accelerate the development of more potent and durable cell therapies while maintaining manufacturability at scale.