Cellares and Mitsui Fudosan Announce the First IDMO Smart Factory for Commercial-Scale Cell Therapy Manufacturing in Japan
The facility, set to open in partnership with Mitsui Fudosan, will utilize Cellares' state-of-the-art technology platforms, the Cell Shuttle™ and Cell Q™, to automate cell therapy manufacturing and quality control. The technology reduces batch prices by up to 50% and eliminates the manufacturing bottlenecks faced by conventional CDMOs that use manual processes. Additionally, the entire Smart Factory will be integrated and optimized to eliminate any downstream bottlenecks as well.
'Cellares' new facility in Kashiwa City will enable our pharma clients to supply Japan from Japan. Manufacturing cell therapies locally simplifies cold chain logistics, accelerates vein-to-vein time and reduces cost,' said Fabian Gerlinghaus, CEO and Co-Founder of Cellares. 'Our Japanese IDMO Smart Factory is part of a broader strategy to be a global manufacturing partner for our clients and meet the total patient demand for cell therapies around the world.'
The new site's impact extends beyond patient care. By accelerating the availability of CAR-T treatments, this initiative has the potential to help advance the development and approval of CAR-T therapeutics in Japan. Once the IDMO Smart Factory is online, technical transfers between Cellares facilities in other regions are expected to be a seamless, rapid, software-enabled process. Thanks to fully automated processes on standardized technologies, tech transfer can now happen at digital speed.
Dr. Toshihiko Doi, the Chairperson of the Kashiwa-no-ha Life Science Committee, shared, 'For cancer patients in Japan, the establishment of this facility provides access to cutting-edge therapies that can make a critical difference in their fight against diseases. It marks a significant step toward eliminating the drug delivery lag time that has been a challenge for rare disease and oncology treatments.'
Mitsui Fudosan's robust network in Japan's life sciences industry has been instrumental in enabling this collaboration, ensuring the smooth dissemination of information to the pharmaceutical industry, government agencies, and the broader healthcare community.
This announcement represents Cellares' commitment to expanding its footprint in Japan, paving the way for further collaborations and innovations.
For more information, visit cellares.com.
About Cellares
Cellares is the first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) and takes an Industry 4.0 approach to mass manufacturing the living drugs of the 21st century. The company is developing and operating integrated technologies for cell therapy manufacturing to accelerate access to life-saving cell therapies. The company's Cell Shuttle™ integrates all the technologies required for the entire manufacturing process in a flexible and high-throughput platform that delivers end-to-end automation. While the Cell Shuttle automates cell therapy manufacturing, the Cell Q™ automates quality control at high throughput, both for in-process and release QC. Cell Shuttles™ and Cell Qs™ will be deployed in Cellares' Smart Factories around the world, enabling each Smart Factory to produce 10 times as many cell therapy batches as a conventional CDMO with the same facility size and headcount. Partnering with Cellares enables academic medical centers, biotechnology companies, and pharmaceutical companies to accelerate cell therapy development and scale out manufacturing, lower process failure rates, lower manufacturing costs, and meet global patient demand.
The company is headquartered in South San Francisco, California with its first commercial-scale IDMO Smart Factory in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Cellares is building a global network of IDMO Smart Factories, with additional facilities under construction in Europe and Japan. The company is backed by world-class investors and has raised over $355 million in financing.
For more information about Cellares, please visit cellares.com.
About Mitsui Fudosan Co.
Mitsui Fudosan is working to create new industries during this time of change in society and the economy. As a "Platformer," the company provides "Places" and "Communities" that bring together the ideas of companies, society, and individuals. In April 2024, it launched a Group's New Long-Term Vision, setting a strategy to explore areas beyond real estate. To support this, Innovation Promoting Division was established to drive innovation and help create new industries. At Kashiwa-no-ha Smart City, Mitsui Fudosan works with the public, private, and academic sectors to create a community where people can live healthy lives and where new life science industries can grow.
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She fell in love with traditional Japanese homes during a high school trip. At 24, she bought one in the countryside.
Coline Aguirre bought a traditional house in the Japanese countryside when she was 24. She left France and moved to Japan alone to restore the property and start her own real-estate consultancy. "It's been three years now, but it still feels like a dream," Aguirre said. Coline Aguirre first began to imagine her future during a high school exchange program in Japan a decade ago. Aguirre, who was born in Paris but moved around a lot as a child, spent a year studying in Kanagawa, a prefecture about 40 miles outside Tokyo. During a visit to her host family's grandparents in the countryside, she discovered that they lived in a traditional Japanese house built in the '70s, with elegant wooden beams and beautiful tatami rooms. "That was the first time I slept in a tatami room. Before that, I had only been in really modern city houses in Japan," Aguirre told Business Insider. "I fell in love, and in that moment, I knew I wanted to own a traditional house in Japan." Love Business Insider? Add Business Insider as a preferred source on Google to see more of us. Fast-forward to 2021: Aguirre was back in France and working as a freelance photographer. Over the years, she and her mother had nurtured a shared hobby of scrolling through real-estate websites and window-shopping for homes. "At the time, I was discovering the real estate market in Japan and noticing the really low prices," Aguirre said. In France, a countryside home could easily set her back by 200,000 euros. In contrast, some houses in rural Japan can go for as low as $500. The contrast was striking, and it got her thinking about the possibilities. "In France, if I wanted to buy something new with the money I had then, it would be a car or a garage. I don't want to live in a car or in a garage," she said. 'A hundred years old, minimum' Thus started her hunt for a "kominka," or a farmhouse, in the Japanese countryside. Aguirre was looking for a large property, with enough room for a photo studio. 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Her husband, who is in the French Army, knew this was her plan soon after they first got together. "From the moment we started dating eight years ago, I already told him I'm going to be a house owner in Japan one day. And it eventually happened," Aguirre said. She officially moved to Japan alone later that year. "I had no plan. I was just trusting the universe," Aguirre, now 27, said. Her parents were also supportive of her move. It helped that they were already familiar with Japan: Her father had spent a year working in Tokyo, and her mother had been to the country multiple times on vacation. Growing up, she was used to her parents buying and fixing up old houses in France. "I had no perception of what was scary or not," Aguirre said. "We've been doing that so many times, it just felt normal for me to buy a house." Restoring the house Aguirre's house sits on a street where the old market used to be. The street reminds her of Kyoto, with its shops and old houses. 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She hopes to continue growing her real estate business, now a team of three, and eventually connect traditional Japanese homes with buyers seeking homes and spaces for their creative projects. "It still feels like a dream," Aguirre said. "I just added more layers to my dream." Do you have a story to share about building your dream home in Asia? Contact this reporter at agoh@ Read the original article on Business Insider Solve the daily Crossword
Business Insider
2 hours ago
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She fell in love with traditional Japanese homes during a high school trip. At 24, she bought one in the countryside.
Coline Aguirre first began to imagine her future during a high school exchange program in Japan a decade ago. Aguirre, who was born in Paris but moved around a lot as a child, spent a year studying in Kanagawa, a prefecture about 40 miles outside Tokyo. During a visit to her host family's grandparents in the countryside, she discovered that they lived in a traditional Japanese house built in the '70s, with elegant wooden beams and beautiful tatami rooms. "That was the first time I slept in a tatami room. Before that, I had only been in really modern city houses in Japan," Aguirre told Business Insider. "I fell in love, and in that moment, I knew I wanted to own a traditional house in Japan." Fast-forward to 2021: Aguirre was back in France and working as a freelance photographer. Over the years, she and her mother had nurtured a shared hobby of scrolling through real-estate websites and window-shopping for homes. 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When she chanced upon the listing for a 3,200-square-foot property in Uda, a small town about 50 miles south of Kyoto, she knew she had found the one. "It matched all my expectations. It was huge, maybe a bit too huge, but it had an inner garden, two bathrooms, two kitchens, and a lot of bedrooms," Aguirre said. It was also a 15-minute drive to the train station, and about an hour and a half from the ocean. With the help of a consultant on a real-estate portal — who sent her a 20-minute video tour of the listing — Aguirre bought the two-story house remotely, without seeing it in person. Aguirre says she paid about 4.9 million Japanese yen for the property in 2022, and at the age of 24, achieved her dream of buying a traditional house in the Japanese countryside. Her husband, who is in the French Army, knew this was her plan soon after they first got together. "From the moment we started dating eight years ago, I already told him I'm going to be a house owner in Japan one day. And it eventually happened," Aguirre said. She officially moved to Japan alone later that year. "I had no plan. I was just trusting the universe," Aguirre, now 27, said. Her parents were also supportive of her move. It helped that they were already familiar with Japan: Her father had spent a year working in Tokyo, and her mother had been to the country multiple times on vacation. Growing up, she was used to her parents buying and fixing up old houses in France. "I had no perception of what was scary or not," Aguirre said. "We've been doing that so many times, it just felt normal for me to buy a house." Restoring the house Aguirre's house sits on a street where the old market used to be. The street reminds her of Kyoto, with its shops and old houses. "The post office is in front of me, while there's a bank at the end of the road," she said. When her house was first built in the 1920s, the front section facing the street served as a soy sauce shop. 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Though much of the experience has been rewarding, Aguirre says the hardest part of her move was staying focused on her goals. "It is super challenging to own that kind of big house that needs constant attention, while also starting a business from zero in a new country with a new language," she said. She hopes to improve her Japanese language skills, but hasn't found the time to take lessons. "For now, my language classes are me talking to my neighbors," Aguirre said. Most of her neighbours are between 50 and 90 years old and have been living in the area for decades. Many of them once attended the local elementary school, which has since been transformed into a maple park. That said, meeting new people hasn't been difficult. A fairly large group of foreigners — mostly from the US and the UK — are living in Uda, she said. "When you go grocery shopping and you see someone else who is a foreigner, you basically go and talk to them because it's so rare," Aguirre said. 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