Latest / The BioHub - by Avetix / Episode 132 - Fabian Gerlinghaus - Co-Founder & CEO of Cellares
Transcript
- 0:06On this episode of Dubai Hub Podcast, we're joined by Fabian
- 0:08Gillenhaus, CEO and Co founder of Solaris.
- 0:13So since founding in 2019, Solaris have raised over $600
- 0:16million to develop their fully automated cell therapy
- 0:20manufacturing platform. It's got the likes of Carl,
- 0:24Dune, Pioneer and Cell Therapy Space calling it a game changer.
- 0:28And it's backed by, yeah, big pharma partnerships with the
- 0:31likes of BMS. So yeah, really interested to get to know a
- 0:35little bit about the origin story.
- 0:37Fabian today. Been a crazy few years.
- 0:41Indeed, a husband. Callum, thank you for having me.
- 0:43I'm looking forward to the conversation.
- 0:45Very good, awesome. I mean, we always ask Fabian for
- 0:49for any guest who comes on. I think it's really helpful to
- 0:51get to know a little bit about your own personal back story.
- 0:55Obviously grew up in in Munich, right And were robotics to start
- 1:00with and then a transition to sunny California and and
- 1:04biotech, yeah. How did that transition come
- 1:08about? Yeah.
- 1:09Yeah, happy to I I'm an aerospace engineer by training.
- 1:14Born, raised, trained in in Germany at the Technical
- 1:18University of Munich and then came over to the Bay Area,
- 1:21California about 13 years ago now and made a switch into the
- 1:25life science tool space, became an inventor of quite a few
- 1:29different biotech tools. Just before starring Solaris, I
- 1:33was the chief innovation officer at the Crispo cast 9 GM
- 1:35engineering company actually developing tools for monoclonal
- 1:39antibody manufacturing, biorectors, centrifuges.
- 1:42And that's how I got exposure to inventing novel bioprocessing
- 1:47technologies and leading a department in in that space.
- 1:51And I'm also I was very fortunate to meet my Co founder
- 1:56there, Omar Curdy. Omar ran a $200 million business
- 2:00unit that's Hammer Fisher Scientific making certified
- 2:02medical devices. And then they've worked at
- 2:05Finesse. Finesse was selling 2000 liters
- 2:08single use biorectors to virtually every pharma company
- 2:11until Samer Fisher bought them. And then he and I met together
- 2:14met at Centigo and and what then happened next was I will say a
- 2:23really key inflection moment in, in in modern medicine 2017, the
- 2:30first Carty cell therapy was FDA approved.
- 2:32That was Kymriah, which was invented by our advisor,
- 2:35professor Doctor Carl Jun out licensed and commercialized by
- 2:39Novartis. And it really marked the
- 2:44beginning of the commercialization phase in cell
- 2:47therapies. For prior to that cell therapies
- 2:49were by and large in academic pursuit with 10 patients in the
- 2:55clinical trial here, 20 patients in the clinical trial there.
- 2:58But nobody had the challenge of how do you scale this up to a
- 3:03commercial scale numbers. So 10,000 patients a year,
- 3:0620,000 patients a year, 100,000 patients per year per drug.
- 3:10And at this point, we've got more than 1/2 a dozen drugs on
- 3:12the market. Cell therapies have proven their
- 3:14potential to actually cure very, very aggressive forms of blood
- 3:18cancers. Where chemotherapies have
- 3:19failed, they're now expanding to solid tumors, autoimmune
- 3:23diseases, rare genetic diseases. So it's, it's really a
- 3:27completely new class of medicines that's incredibly
- 3:30powerful and and very, very different than small molecules
- 3:32of biologics DD medicines that came before us and the other
- 3:36cell had been manufacturing bottleneck.
- 3:38And that's that's what Omar and I set out to solve when we
- 3:41started Solaris in 2019. Yeah.
- 3:44When did you start noticing the bottleneck?
- 3:46I guess after Kim Rao was launched, sort of, yeah.
- 3:492018-2019 you guys got together, started talking about it more
- 3:53and more and then the idea becomes Solaris or.
- 3:57Yeah, that's right. So Omar and I, we were attending
- 4:00all the typical cell type of conferences and the picture that
- 4:04emerged was cell therapies represent world class science.
- 4:10The scientific challenges have been solved and what was holding
- 4:12back cell therapy now is really the lack of industrialization,
- 4:19the lack of high throughput, fully automated cell therapy
- 4:22manufacturing technologies. People were screaming from the
- 4:24rooftops, we've got cures for cancer and we just have no way
- 4:28of manufacturing them at scale at a sustainable price.
- 4:31Yeah, I mean, it's probably the biggest challenge in self
- 4:35opiate, right. I mean, obviously you've, you've
- 4:38identified the problem that coming up with a solution to
- 4:41it's a entirely different proposition, right.
- 4:44I know you're both inventors as it were.
- 4:48Walk us through the early days like what, what did the the
- 4:51platform look like at the beginning?
- 4:53Because I'd imagine it's very different now to what you set
- 4:56out with. It's actually exactly what we
- 5:00envisioned when we first set out our, our board members sometimes
- 5:04point this out and set up. And now we walk through your
- 5:07facilities in the US, Europe, Japan and we see these cell
- 5:11shuttles in the South use that you've built and they pretty
- 5:14much look exactly like the early wireframes that you pitched us
- 5:17on during your Series A. So I think you know, the, the
- 5:22core when it comes to the technology, the core insight was
- 5:26what's holding back self hyper manufacturing at scale at a
- 5:29sustainable price. And it's really, but those are
- 5:31the two key problems. You know, how do you scale this
- 5:33up to meet the needs of all the patients that are eligible and
- 5:38in need of car T cell therapies? How do you bring down the
- 5:42manufacturing cost? How do you make self hyper
- 5:44manufacturing much more reliable and, and then also how do you
- 5:48streamline tech transfer to other to, to other markets like
- 5:53Europe and Japan? I think those those were the key
- 5:55problems and the key insight initially was, well, in order to
- 6:00make cell therapy manufacturing scalable, we need to automate
- 6:04the entire process from start to finish.
- 6:06In order to make cell therapy manufacturing reliable and bring
- 6:09down the process failure rates, which are sky high in the
- 6:12industry today with millennial cell manufacturing, we need to
- 6:16fully close the process. And that led us to build a
- 6:20consumable cartridge that's about the size of a carry on
- 6:23piece of luggage that is actually a whole laboratory in
- 6:26the box. It contains all of the different
- 6:28technologies required to run the entire self manufacturing
- 6:31process from start to finish. So specifically there's a
- 6:34centrifuge, an Excel sorter, electroprater, Birect or steroid
- 6:38transit technology in there, all connected in one closed fully
- 6:42automated tubing set. And that's how we're automating
- 6:45entire process from start to finish.
- 6:47And then we built a cell shell that's roughly the size of a big
- 6:50conference room. And the cell shell actually can
- 6:54receive 16 of those cartridges. And each cartridge is an
- 6:57independent swim lane. You know, each cartridge can run
- 7:00a different cell type of manufacturing process, different
- 7:03drug product for a different pharma company, for a different
- 7:05patient. And that throughput is
- 7:07unprecedented. You know, so most of the most of
- 7:13the technologies I used in manual cell phone manufacturing
- 7:16today are bench top equipment that handle one of the
- 7:19manufacturing steps for one patient at a time.
- 7:21And what we're starting with the cell shuttle is we're, we're
- 7:24automating all of the manufacturing steps for 16
- 7:27patients at the same time. And then the cell shuttle can
- 7:29produce up to 2800 patient doses per year.
- 7:32So with, you know, the entire industry producing just over
- 7:3630,000 patient doses last year. What that means is that you
- 7:41know, with, with five to say 20 socials, depending on the
- 7:48process length, the throughput is different somewhere between
- 7:505:00 to 20 socials. We could have manufactured every
- 7:52single cell therapy dose with the, the entire industry
- 7:56manufactured last year. So that's, that's really hard
- 8:01throughput that solves your scalability issue.
- 8:04And then that's, I think maybe just finishing up the second
- 8:08point on the second big problem is, of course manufacturing
- 8:11costs and manufacturing costs today are incredibly high
- 8:15because you've got teams of highly skilled scientists, very
- 8:19highly qualified labor spending weeks in very expensive clean
- 8:22rooms using a plethora of these benchtop instruments that I
- 8:25mentioned. And I'm doing a lot of manual
- 8:28labor meanwhile and our fully automated technologies to sell
- 8:33for automated manufacturing, the sell key for automated quality
- 8:35control together actually reduce the amount of labour that's
- 8:39required by about 90%. So where our competitors on
- 8:43doing manual self-employed manufacturing need to hire and
- 8:46train thousands of employees, we need to hire and train hundreds,
- 8:50roughly an order of magnitude less people.
- 8:53That is both what unlocks the scale because there's actually
- 8:56dearth of cell therapy talent. You can't even hire enough
- 8:59people. And it also dramatically reduces
- 9:01the, the cost. And at the same time, I the, you
- 9:09know, the central is a big machine that's very compact.
- 9:11It's, it's equivalent to about 100 of these bench top
- 9:15instruments in one machine that put 100 bench top instruments on
- 9:19100 benches with enough space for the human operators to walk
- 9:23around and actually do their work.
- 9:24You're going to take up 10 times more space than the social takes
- 9:27up. So that's how we're shrinking
- 9:29facility size by also an order of magnitude.
- 9:33So where our competitors need to build 10 facilities to produce a
- 9:38certain number of cell therapy doses, we need to build 1
- 9:41facility of the same size. So 10 times less facilities
- 9:45required, 10 times less people are required.
- 9:47That makes the whole thing scalable.
- 9:49That makes self help manufacturing I host efficient,
- 9:53scalable, and then also closing the process.
- 9:56Automating the process reduces process failure rates due to
- 9:59operator error and contamination, which helps us
- 10:02reduce process failure rates by about 75% compared with manual
- 10:06self help manufacturing. Yeah, it's an interesting point
- 10:09you mentioned as well. Like, yeah, it's not replacing
- 10:12unskilled labour by any stretch, right?
- 10:14Those those sites have been notoriously difficult to staff
- 10:18over the years because of just how special that the rules are.
- 10:22Yeah, we've seen that for sure. I mean, all of that is why
- 10:25you've been allocated the advance AMT right from the FDA.
- 10:32Talk us through how rare that is.
- 10:34First of its kind, essentially. Yeah, yeah.
- 10:37So we've, we've had a really good collaborative dialogue with
- 10:40the FDA ever since we started Solaris.
- 10:44The FDA actually very wise move of, of the regulators created
- 10:49the pathway called the cat path Catt and it was a, a pathway for
- 10:56developers of advanced manufacturing technologies to
- 10:58have an early dialogue with the regulators and keep them
- 11:01involved from from the very beginning, educate them, seek
- 11:04their feedback, seek their input.
- 11:06So that's what we've done with the regulators.
- 11:09We've also, by the way, done that with our customers.
- 11:11We've we've had a whole partnership program to actually
- 11:13inform the user needs and requirements from gathered user
- 11:17needs and requirements from not just one company, but a whole
- 11:20number of companies. So collaboration has been the
- 11:22name of the game from the beginning.
- 11:25And then I at a later stage, we actually applied to the for the
- 11:30advanced manufacturing technologies designation from
- 11:32the FDA and Solaris was the first company to be granted an
- 11:37advanced manufacturing, the advanced manufacturing
- 11:41technologies designation AMT designation at all.
- 11:44And to the state, we're the only company who's received the AMT
- 11:49designation for a high throughput automated end to end
- 11:52self hybrid manufacturing platform.
- 11:55Yeah, it's super impressive. And you can sort of say why when
- 11:58when you talk it through like you just have they've been cool.
- 12:03I mean, talk us through where you're at now because you're
- 12:06developing or you are now sorry manufacturing clinical grade GMB
- 12:11material that's going to patients that.
- 12:14Is the biggest. That is the biggest news.
- 12:16That is the biggest news. We are incredibly excited and
- 12:20incredibly proud to say that at this point we're actually
- 12:24manufacturing cell therapies on the cell shuttle in our own
- 12:29facilities, in Solaris facilities as a service for
- 12:32paying customers in an FDA regulated environment.
- 12:35And we're doing that for patient infusion, supporting the
- 12:37clinical trials of our customers.
- 12:40That is a huge, huge value inflection point.
- 12:42If you're thinking about it, you know, we started Solaris to
- 12:46manufacture cell therapies for patient infusion on highly
- 12:49automated, scalable, cost efficient technologies.
- 12:52We built ourselves and after seven years, seven years of
- 12:57company building technology, building facility building,
- 12:59building quality management systems, I signing up the
- 13:04customers doing preclinical proof of concept work with them,
- 13:08ultimately generating strong comparability data between the
- 13:12manual and the automated process.
- 13:13Filing that comparability data. I with the regulator is gaining
- 13:18regulatory approval. That was that was a big
- 13:20milestone for us. In January, the FDA actually
- 13:23cleared Caballita's Ind amendment and ultimately gave us
- 13:28permission to proceed into clinical manufacturing,
- 13:30manufacturing drug products for patients for Caballera, that's
- 13:36it was a lot of work to get to the point where we're now at
- 13:39manufacturing drugs for patient infusion on the cell shuttle in
- 13:42our own facilities. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
- 13:44And with the way you guys are set up with technology transfer
- 13:48being a hell of a lot easier by this model as well, commercial
- 13:52grade production, that's next year, right?
- 13:54Correct. We're we're planning for the
- 13:55first commercial scale launch in 2027.
- 13:59Awesome. I guess when, when you've
- 14:01successfully done that, if and when you successfully get that
- 14:04going, I should say. I mean, I guess the question is
- 14:09why, why would anyone go over a traditional route?
- 14:12I mean, yeah, the the cost savings, the time efficiency,
- 14:16Yeah, it seems like a a win, win, right.
- 14:20Yeah. I think that'll become
- 14:21increasingly rare. And I've always said that's a,
- 14:24it's a winner takes all market. And I ultimately I think cell
- 14:28therapy companies will long term either partner with Solaris or
- 14:31or lose in the marketplace. We're offering the lowest cost
- 14:34of manufacturing in the industry, which means
- 14:37significant increases in gross margins for the pharma companies
- 14:40that makes cell therapy manufacturing sustainable for
- 14:44them. And also I think long term will
- 14:46help reduce drug prices. And then scalability is a big
- 14:51boon for patients. You know, the core problem that
- 14:54we started is a is a patient problem.
- 14:56It's the lack of access to these life changing, often times life
- 15:01saving cell therapies. And you know, there are many
- 15:05publications on this that state that even today only about two
- 15:09out of 10 patients eligible patients actually receive a cell
- 15:13therapy because of the manufacturing bottleneck.
- 15:16And we'll say also pharma companies by and large haven't
- 15:20really turned on the sales engine yet to aggressively push
- 15:24their products into the market because why would you do that if
- 15:27you know you're going to be supply constrained?
- 15:29So scalability is a big boon for patients.
- 15:32It actually democratizes cell therapies and, and makes it
- 15:37possible for all the patients who need cell therapies to gain
- 15:39access and then also unlocks a lot of business for the pharma
- 15:42companies. And then quality is a really
- 15:46important point. We're reducing process failure
- 15:48rates by about 75% versus manual cell type of manufacturing.
- 15:52And that directly impacts the reputation of our pharma and
- 15:57biotech clients in the marketplace, which directly
- 16:01impacts their market share. You know, if, if you've got 2
- 16:05competing cell therapies and one is delivered on time and on spec
- 16:10every single time and the other one is sometimes late, sometimes
- 16:15manufacturing process failed and didn't work at all.
- 16:18Well as an oncologist, if you have a choice between
- 16:21prescribing the one product or the other product, what are you
- 16:23going to do? You're going to prescribe the
- 16:25drug product that is delivered on time, on spec reliably every
- 16:30single time. And I think that is only
- 16:33achievable with automation because too many manual steps
- 16:37for 10s of thousands of patients per year.
- 16:41Humans are just not good at repeating the same steps over
- 16:44and over again and never making a mistake.
- 16:46Meanwhile it's fully automated process.
- 16:49Whatever comes up, you fix it once in hardware or software and
- 16:51then it never happens again. We just move sailing from there
- 16:55on out. So.
- 16:56I mean, I think what's crazy percentages in terms of FDA
- 16:59rejections for CMC related issues, right?
- 17:02The amount of CRLS out there in the past 18 months is, is pretty
- 17:06crazy. So cool.
- 17:08Talking of expansion news on Leiden, Netherlands and a new
- 17:13facility in Japan as well. What what made you up for those
- 17:16two locations? Yeah, we're, we're on a mission.
- 17:19We're on a mission to meet the total patient demand for cell
- 17:22therapies globally and we're doing that through rapidly
- 17:25expanding network of IDMO smart factories.
- 17:28And I think the the primary driver for this was our wasn't
- 17:33was an anchor partnership with Bristol-Myers Group.
- 17:36This is all public information we've got.
- 17:38We've got a $380 million partnership with Bristol-Myers
- 17:41Group for commercial skilled manufacturing in the US, Europe
- 17:44and Japan, $380 million in upfronts and milestones, not
- 17:49counting the actual business of actually manufacturing cell
- 17:53therapies is a commercial skip for on an ongoing basis, of
- 17:56course. And if you think about it from
- 17:59the pharma perspective, I, you know, for many cell therapies,
- 18:04manufacturing locally, and I don't mean bedside, bedside
- 18:07doesn't work, but manufacturing on the same continent is a
- 18:11practical reality. Just because shipping the
- 18:15starting material, the apheresis from the hospital and shipping
- 18:19back the final cell therapy for, for infusion.
- 18:22If you have to do that across the Atlantic for for Europe or
- 18:27across the Pacific for for Japan, that actually delays on I
- 18:33that, that, that delays I the time that is allowable based on
- 18:38the on the guidance from the regulators between collection
- 18:41for recess and started manufacturing beyond the time
- 18:44window that's been agreed upon with with the regulators.
- 18:46So we do need to manufacture locally.
- 18:49I will say an added benefit in this day and age with with all
- 18:52the tariffs globally is local manufacturing on on the same
- 18:58continent. It actually helps from a tariff
- 18:59perspective as well. And it also helps from business
- 19:03continuity perspective because you know, if in the case of a
- 19:07supply chain disruption, we don't have one facility, we've
- 19:10got a whole network of facilities globally.
- 19:12And while it's not ideal to ship drug products across the Pacific
- 19:16or the Atlantic, can we do that in an emergency?
- 19:19Of course. And from that perspective,
- 19:23building out these facilities is really crucial to the business
- 19:28continuity aspect of our service offering.
- 19:30But then ultimately comes back to what we talked about earlier,
- 19:33scale, the, the scale that we're building out here depends on
- 19:38the, on the length of the process, right?
- 19:40Cell therapy process, manufacturing process.
- 19:43He's varying length somewhere between 2 and 10 days.
- 19:46That's a big swing, right? If if you have a 2 day process,
- 19:48you can manufacture five times more cell therapies in the same
- 19:51time. We know that it would make him
- 19:52take you to manufacture A10 day process.
- 19:56So across the network of our facilities, we're building out
- 19:59capacity for somewhere between 40,000 and 200,000 patient doses
- 20:03across all the facilities in the US, Europe and Japan.
- 20:06Nice. Yeah, It's super exciting.
- 20:08I mean, funding that expansion, something that needs to be
- 20:13talked about as well. Obviously super impressive to
- 20:15see. Yeah.
- 20:16We're, we're actually, Yeah, yeah.
- 20:19How was that? I, I will call out that this
- 20:25global expansion we're very, I think we've been very smart in
- 20:30terms of how we structured that financially.
- 20:32First and foremost, we're not buying these facilities, we're
- 20:36leasing them for 10 to 15 years. So we're, we're effectively only
- 20:39paying rent. And then we negotiated very,
- 20:44very strong tent improvement packages with the various
- 20:47landlords and for the various facilities.
- 20:50So the the shell of the building we never pay for the internal
- 20:56build out is largely financed by by the landlords themselves.
- 21:01We committed to very long term leases, 10 to 15 years and it
- 21:04just makes financial sense. But landlords to put a lot of
- 21:08money towards building out the facility and then putting the
- 21:12actual equipment in there is largely financed by our clients.
- 21:17So I, I think in, in this way, we're able to structure the
- 21:22financials of our global expansion or in such a way that
- 21:26we're actually using very, very little equity dollars to expand
- 21:32globally and and build out the the global infrastructure that's
- 21:34required for commercial skill manufacturing and meeting the
- 21:38entire patient demand globally. And yeah, I think you wanted to
- 21:44touch on Series D. Yeah, yeah, sure.
- 21:47Just how you found it. I mean, that's obviously a super
- 21:50impressive raise, but yeah. I, I will say, you know, capital
- 21:57markets were easier in 2022 or you know, 2021 even 2019.
- 22:05So this was not the easiest market and at the same time the
- 22:10best companies always get funded.
- 22:12And so you know, in in January, late January, we're very proud
- 22:16to announce that we raised a 200 two $157 million serious deal
- 22:20led by BlackRock and Eclipse to industrialize global sell time
- 22:24manufacturing with breakthrough automation.
- 22:25And Eclipse, of course, is has been backing Solaris for many,
- 22:32many rounds since the inception of the company.
- 22:34But BlackRock is a new investor that's newly backed the company
- 22:39in this financing. Then we also attracted a number
- 22:43of additional very high profile growth class Wall Street firms
- 22:48such as T Rowe Price, but but also Billy Gifford, Gates,
- 22:55Frontier on high, Harvard Management to Kane, Intuitive
- 23:00Ventures, EBI Mitsui. There's there's a long list of
- 23:05of new backers who newly newly joined the cap table in in this
- 23:09financing. Yeah, super impressive.
- 23:12And yeah, it's exciting to see where you guys are going to take
- 23:15things in the next couple of years.
- 23:16Is there? I know you've been fairly vocal
- 23:19about it elsewhere. Is plan to go public in the
- 23:21next? Couple of years.
- 23:23Or. Yeah, that's timeline.
- 23:25Yeah, that's right. So the plan with this financing
- 23:28is ultimately to finance the company all the way through the
- 23:33first, well, of course, clinical scale manufacturing.
- 23:37That's what we're doing right now for multiple customers in
- 23:412026 and then the first commercial launch on a cell
- 23:45therapy on our platform in our own facilities in 2027.
- 23:50And yes, as you mentioned that we're planning for an IPO
- 23:54shortly thereafter. Yeah, nice.
- 23:57Our can't wait to try the progress.
- 23:58And yeah, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it.
- 24:01Great to get the insight into such a, yeah, groundbreaking
- 24:05option. Like you say, cell therapies
- 24:07prove that it can work. It's just about the scale.
- 24:10So. Yeah, look.
- 24:11Forward to see Keeping in touch. Awesome.
- 24:14Thank you so much for your time today and thanks for having me.
- 24:17Yeah, pleasure.